LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



HOMESTEAD HIGHWAYS 



HOMESTEAD HIGHWAYS 



HERBERT MILTON SYLVESTER 

AUTHOR OF "PROSE PASTORALS" 



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_ MAY 16 1888 7) * 

.... 



BOSTON 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY 

2U Fremont Street 
1888 






PSa<76« 



Copyright, iSSs, 
By H. M. Sylvester. 



All Rights Reserved. 



ELECTROTYPED BY 

C. J. Peters & Son, Boston. 



>J 



g0 mv( ^ximti, 

CHARLES E. HURD, ESQ. 

TO WHOSE FRIENDLY SUGGESTION AND ENCOURAGEMENT 
ITS WRITING IS IN SOME PART DUE, 

THIS BOOK 

IS DEDICATED BY 

THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE 



Nature is the mother of sentiment, and to 
multitudes of people nothing is more charming 
in its reminiscent quality than the old New Eng- 
land country life. Away from its quiet home- 
steads and tree-shadowed highways, into the noisy, 
crowded ruts of the city, the awakened memories of 
its old-fashioned and simple habits, its plain fare, its 
open-handed hospitality, are like beautiful pictures 
swept clear of years of dust and cobwebs. A boy- 
hood or a girlhood laid among such pastoral scenes 
is the halcyon period of a life-time. Of such, 
among the fields, the woods, the meadows and 
streams, my book is in part a suggestion. 

Quincy, Mass., May i, 1888. 



CONTENTS. 



A Mute Prophecy 15 

An Old-Fashioned Festival 19 

A Winter Resort 83 

Running Water . 135 

A Snug Corner 183 

A Wayside Watering-place 243 

A Drop of Rain 291 



L' ENVOI. 

" As the spinners to the end 
Downward go and re-ascend, 

Gleam the long threads in the sun; 
While within this brain of mine 
Cobwebs, brighter and more fine, 
By the busy wheel are spun." 

Longfellow. 



A MUTE PROPHECY. 



A MUTE PROPHECY. 

Aslant the threshold of the West 

Stretches a sombre reef 
Of gray; its low, uneven scarp, 

Outlined in sharp relief 
Against the sky, is roughly set 

With pinnacles that glow 
Like Norombega's mustery 

Of centuries ago. 
The hills, with rugged, rock-set domes, 

Wind-blown and bare, uprear 
Their brightly polished topaz walls, 

In the clear atmosphere ; 
While o'er the cloud's thin, ragged rift 

Burst the deep golden floods 
Of Nature's alchemy, that sift 

Their glory through the woods. 

Night comes : the Spirit of the Frost 

His shuttle swifter plies 
'Twixt Nature's warp, and swifter weaves 

For Earth its subtle guise ; 
And down the river-path the pines 

Echo the dreary cry 
Of winds whose dying cadences 

Are Nature's lullaby. 
In the crisp air of growing dusk 

Night sets her cordon-line 
Thick with groups of glittering stars, 

That weirdly burn and shine, 
And come and go, as silently 

As lights that far at sea 
Are sailed o'er restless tides, by hands 

We cannot know or see. 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL 




AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

HE transition from royal-hued golden-rod 
and humble frost-flower, from the brown 
woodlands and sunny, restful days of 
October to the gray, dreary moods of November, 
is hardly noticeable until the skies are overcast 
and the winds blow chill with threatening cold, 
until the wandering snow-flake, drifting slowly, 
silently, out of the gusty North, brings an abrupt 
awakening to one's dream of lingering summer. 
Like the birds of passage that have taken their 
departure so abruptly, blossoming June, Midsum- 
mer, and nutty October have journeyed into other 
lands, to return like our old friends, the singing 
birds, with coming days, days well rounded with 
additional cheer and welcome. Nature is full of 
quaint conceits, but is more lovable for them all. 
How much of prophecy one day holds of those 
immediately following is revealed only to the most 
intimate acquaintances of Nature, and yet what 
she holds for one she holds for all. Once within 
the spell of her witchery, and we read her signs 
clearly. What a novel-writer she is ! What ro- 

19 



20 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

mances of orchard and wayside, and what deeps 
of woodland tragedy, what plots and counter-plots 
are hers ! But Nature is a great confidant ; and if 
you will stop a moment by the way to listen, she 
will tell you many a wonderful tale, and much that 
you will be surprised to know. Never of garrulous 
habit, as is our friend who cannot finish his story 
until his finger is well fastened in our button- 
hole, she is, for all that, a great talker ; and 
if you wish to hear what she has to say, you 
must listen with wide-open eyes, for there are ways 
of hearing without the domain of the ears, as your 
eyes will best tell you ; yet without the careful 
training of both eye and ear, so far as any con- 
verse with Nature is concerned, you might well 
be both blind and deaf. 

Day after day the brilliant orange of the golden- 
rod towering above the pasture hedges in its 
stately beauty, crowding every niche in the sharp 
angles of the sagging rail fences, — the one bit of 
bright color in the fields, — the pale blue of the 
gentian by the meadow brooks, the delicate beauty 
of the wayside flower, always known as the har- 
binger of the ending year, and the rich hues of 
the woods grow fainter, grayer yet, until they are 
but the apparitions of their former selves. Forest 
and field grow grayer with every white frost, and 
the skies above them are colder, grayer than all 
else. 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 21 

There is something human about these ways of 
Nature, so full of hints of ice-crystals and bluster- 
ing, snowy winds. The frosty autumn, like some 
people in their ways, once genial but now grown 
distant and unsympathizing, has a touch of vague 
warning and reproach. What a chilly greeting 
every morning, bright or dull, brings with it ! The 
very sun, that rode so imperiously over the summer- 
lands, bends lower down in the south, as if full of 
foreboding. These still days are alive with notes 
of preparation, as if something of estrangement 
and evil were impending, so surly are the influ- 
ences which follow in the train of bleak November, 
the Disillusionist of the year, with its short days 
and lengthening nights. 

Leaden shadows shut down over the bare coun- 
try-ways, now silent and deserted, down over the 
mazy windings of the sleepy lowland wood-roads, 
above the grass-grown ruts of which are spread 
out the wide-flaring tops of the trees blown clear 
of their singing leaves, and that nowadays are 
ever reaching out their brown arms into the 
openings, as if to get ample room to swing them- 
selves in the coming wintry tempests. The rushes 
in the swamps, that stand stark and straight as 
ever, have grown dun-colored and sombre-hued, 
and the gnarled, scraggy-limbed apple-trees on the 
hill-side, and along the fences and boundary lines 
of the fields, are barren of all fruitage except a 



22 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

solitary apple, clinging with obstinate grip to the 
topmost twig here and there in the orchard, each 
one a small, black spot against the sky. But the 
grass in the swales holds its brilliancy of verdure, 
while the edges of the runlets are daintily frescoed 
with rare prismatic colors which play about their 
fretwork of icy cornice and frieze with every glint 
of sunshine. Down on the meadow-lands, over 
the margins of the streams, filled to the brim with 
the passing over of the heavy fall rains, the bushy- 
topped willows lean far out, their black, massy, 
misshapen trunks bristling with hosts of long and 
slender lances of light green, tipped with Vene- 
tian red, as if held in a huge quiver, or sticking 
out thickly like the quills of a porcupine ; and 
above and below are translucent panels of earth 
and sky, and what bits of glorious coloring they 
are ! What deep, black pools are these that stop 
the swiftly rushing waters for a moment ! The 
musk-rats do not seem to relish these episodes in 
Nature, of down-coming floods that sweep their 
dwellings swiftly downstream, and scurry here 
and there with increased activity to repair the 
damage to their houses. Here comes one of these 
water-folk swiftly swimming with the current, to 
make a sudden dive down into the deeps of Great 
Brook so soon as he is aware of my intrusion upon 
his domain. A partridge bursts from cover in the 
fringe of alders behind me, and, with a startled 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 23 

whir, crosses the brook, to disappear in the dwarf 
birches opposite. These are the only signs of 
animate life. A huge white owl has his home 
here in a neighboring hollow stub, but I have seen 
nothing of him to-day. He is no doubt dozing 
after his predatory flight of last night, or planning 
some midnight raid upon Farmer Spurr's chicken- 
roost, — the conscienceless robber ! He is a beau- 
tiful fellow, as shy and afraid of being seen as the 
most bashful urchin you ever saw. His flight is 
well-nigh noiseless, but I have often caught sight 
of him among the meadow elms, on misty days, 
when I have been following down the winding 
pathway of the meadow brook after trout. In the 
pasture the cattle roam about lonesome-like, or 
wait beside the bars in the growing cold of the 
nightfall for the tardy youngster to do his chores — 
of bringing in the wood for the big open fires, and 
of feeding the pigs with the half-frozen pumpkin 
which he has but a few moments before chopped 
atop the wooden bench with its four flaring legs, 
its long, unwieldy blade hung at one end to a link 
and swivel, its haft surmounted with a handle not 
less unwieldy than the blade itself. Cutting 
pumpkins for the pigs and cattle, in those days, 
was one of the preliminaries to the enjoyment of 
the bowl of bread or hominy and milk which came 
after the driving of the cows to the rude comfort 
and fragrant mows of the home-barn. How I 



24 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

pitied the less fortunate herds in a neighboring 
pasture, closely huddled together for warmth and 
company, in the lee of the sprawling stump fence, 
its ragged drapery of pines and spruces at the 
lower corner of the hill-slope but illy drawn to- 
gether, — no doubt, wondering why the farmer did 
not come for them. I remember these spruces 
well, for no more famous breeding-places than 
these self-same pines and spruces — with their 
sprinkling of poplars, spare-limbed and silver- 
leaved — could be recalled for the flocks of partridges 
that bred so abundantly throughout these lowland 
woods ; but these meek, expectant-eyed cattle will 
make their owner pay for this neglect, when they 
get their mottled noses into his stacks of herd- 
grass and redtop, with their eager appetites never 
whetted to a sharper edge. A few days of cold 
and exposure in November costs pounds of pasture- 
fed flesh, but I have noticed that some farmers 
never take their cattle home for the winter until 
the first snow brings its chill warning. How for- 
getful some people are of the comfort of their 
dependents, if their own shins are but comfortably 
toasted, and their own tables abundantly spread ! 

How the acorns and beech-nuts rattle down 
upon the leaf-strewn floors of the woods, these 
gray days ! The cows scuff through wind-piled 
windrows of yellow foliage with quickened steps 
as they go up out of the beeches into the open 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 25 

lands where the thorn-trees blush crimson with 
their ripened berries, homeward ho ! The arrant, 
thieving jays cry, " Shame ! Shame ! " after them, 
no doubt filled with jealous envy as they think of 
the nubbins of succulent corn, fresh from the 
husking pile in the big floors, which await the 
cattle at their tie-up. The jay is a beautiful fellow 
in his suit of azure, black, and white, but I have a 
very poor opinion of him, as I have of his proto- 
type in human guise. I have not much of an 
opinion of mean people, whatever they may wear. 

Not a few days in this month of frozen roads 
with deepened, thick-ribbed ruts, with here and 
there a pool of ice by. the wayside, the farmer 
marks as weather-breeders, and what delusive days 
they are ! The morning comes in warm, and the 
last of the cabbages and turnips are housed. A 
mild haze backs up against the sun. The tem- 
perature is slowly falling, and the air is "full of 
snow," so the farmer says ; but, wait patiently as 
we may for the first spit of snow, the snowfall does 
not come. Down goes the mercury in the ther- 
mometer hung just outside the porch-door, and 
the cows linger in an aimless, discontented man- 
ner about the bars by the roadside. As the after- 
noon wanes the sky slowly changes. The south- 
west is piled deep with clouds that look like the 
broken furrows of newly ploughed lands. The 
landscape grows duller, darker, and more chilly. 



26 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

The gray phantoms of the olden forest, the cen- 
tury-old stumps in the silent pastures, loom up like 
ghosts among the outcropping ledges, and along 
the margin of the woodland below the old barns. 
The low, black roof of the ancient farm-house is 
blacker yet under its shelter of overarching elms. 
Under a lustreless mass of cloud, clear-cut and 
brilliantly outlined, the long, slender bar of crim- 
son gold, stretched clear across the west, has 
grown narrow and narrower still, until upper and 
nether cloud-rim have touched each other, and the 
day is utterly shut out. But what promise lay 
within the molten sea that had so soon ebbed 
away, and what a picture this bit of accentuated 
color against its background of neutral tones, 
above, below, bursting its dykes of far-away moun- 
tain-tops, and flooding the world with a moment 
of golden glory, makes upon the memory ! Years 
may come and go, but the recollection of sunsets 
like this never fades. It is a poem in color, or 
rather like a perfect chord in music. It is enough 
to watch those far-off altars of the dying day in 
silence. They speak a language to the soul that 
human lips are not able to interpret, for there are 
deeps to the heart that the sounding-line of 
speech has never fathomed. The eye is the only 
interpreter of a great passion, and Nature is Pas- 
sion itself. But the misty flocks of the sky have 
been driven to their mountain-pastures ; a random 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 27 

flake of snow strikes the cheek ; one by one the 
lights come out along the old country-road, and 
across the valley ; the dusk is turned into night, 
and the bright hearth-fire is all there is to remind 
one of the brilliant sunset glow. The cricket 
chirps a nocturne, with many a quaver, rest, and 
broken strain among his quaintly pitched notes ; 
the candles sputter as they get lower clown in 
their brazen sockets, smoking and flaring with 
every gust of wind against the ill-fitting sash of the 
windows, loose and worn as all old things are. It 
is a weird, lonesome sound, this creak and^rattle of 
the house-windows, and makes one think of spooks 
and ghost-stories by the bookful. 
Old Salem comes to mind, with 

Its wizards and its witches, 

Withered, toothless, crone and hag, 
Who to tryst in Parris' pasture 

Went astride of broom-stick nag, 

When the winds round roof and gable 

With ghostly utterance blew, 
And the shutters creaked and shuddered 

At the howl of goblin crew, 
And the children hid and cowered 

Beside Good-wife in affright, 
While full of prayer the Good-man stirred 

The hearth-fire's smouldering light. 

There is strange, rhythmic cadence running 
through these noises made by the wind-sprites, 



28 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

and even the house-cat grows restless with the 
increasing commotion, wandering about with 
stealthy tread, with the fur along her spine and 
tail all "on end," and eyes that glow like emeralds 
from the shadows in the farther corners of the big 
room ; but the fire burns more brightly, and the 
blaze leaps higher yet up the broad flue of the 
chimney. The old square corn-popper is brought 
from its obscurity of wooden peg in the garret 
stairway ; and with a tress of well seasoned corn 
from the rafters over the old kitchen, and the 
music of their kernels bursting into snow-white 
bloom, the outer world is forgotten. 

With the innocent diversion of such books, 
well thumbed already, as filled the shelves of 
the little oak-grained cupboard of pine, dark and 
smoke-stained, and that kept the clock silent but 
congenial company, the evening went swiftly by. 
It was a sober enough sort of existence, for the 
entire household maintained the strictest ortho- 
doxy that Andover might prescribe. But firelit 
evenings come to an end, as all else, and, with the 
warning stroke of nine, the boys set their chairs 
against the wall with its oddly figured paper, where- 
on are portrayed Chinese junks with impossible 
lateen sails, tall pagodas with tapering roofs and 
huge flights of winding stairs, the whole combina- 
tion unequalled in its quaint style and sombre 
aspect by any mural designer of nowadays, and, 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 29 

with a short climb up the creaky backstairs, a 
look at the starlit sky, the youngsters are asleep. 

The next morning dawns bright and clear, with 
strengthening cold, and the snow-storm prophesied 
the day before is as far away as ever. The farmer 
reckoned without the morrow. The snow does not 
come for days, but the roads grow smoother with 
the warmth of the mid-day sun and the going 
to and fro of heavy teams. The weather clerk has 
made a diversion in favor of the boys, while the 
lumbermen fret and growl at their idle oxen and 
the poverty-stricken skies, for lumbermen must 
needs have deeps of snow for their creaking sleds. 

The boys scamper for the flooded lowlands with 
their clumsy skates, that have more of wood and 
leather about them than steel or iron, for the ponds 
were rarely frozen over until long after the first 
snows. What hilarious troops of boys went hurry- 
ing over the pasture-walls and down through the 
scented ferns. Rare pleasures those little epi- 
sodes were among the tufts of brown tussock 
sedge and swamp-alders, with their windings, 
twistings, and turnings, in and out, up, down, and 
across, with only the cheery snow-bunting for 
company. 

But there come two or three days of intense, 
stinging cold, that 

" No coat, however stout, 
Of homespun stuff could quite shut out," — 



30 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

still, windless days. On this last day, by noon, the 
weather begins to moderate, and along the edge 
of the southern horizon is stretched a ribbon of 
ashen-colored cloud. A " snow-bank," the weather- 
wise calls it. 

Thanksgiving day comes this week, and without 
a sleigh-ride half its old-time pleasure will be 
missing ; but the cloud is one of Nature's tell- 
tales. The old yellow sleigh, with its big wooden 
runners and peaked dasher, and high square back 
adorned with rudely painted coat-of-arms, and its 
ancient date, will be unslung from the cobwebs 
that drape the sagging beams of the wagon-house, 
its faded cushion of Turkey red redolent with the 
aroma of the well filled apple-bins below. 

What a commotion this launching of the sleigh 
will make among the bees in their warm hives at 
its farther end, as Queen Buzz calls her council 
together, with quaking hearts, to debate upon the 
cause of this unseemly disturbance ; but it will be 
a fruitless discussion, for there is but one avenue 
out of her dominions, and that into the frosty air of 
the orchard, into which her most hardy scouts can 
venture only at their utmost peril ; but men have 
been known to do as foolish things as did ever the 
Knights of Queen Buzz, though they are hardly 
ever so busy. What dainty workers these bees 
are we shall know on the morrow, as the hives are 
rarely ever disturbed before this old-fashioned 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 3 1 

festival is inaugurated, among the late November 
days, when the sweets of the red clover-blossom 
and fragrant honeysuckle will be added to the 
wonderful mysteries of the kitchen that fill the 
unwritten menu that has made New England 
famous for her autumn feast, and which would be 
incomplete without this pastoral of the humble 
honey-gatherer with pollen-dusted wings and glint 
of summer sunshine and hint of meadow-bloom. 
Oh, the royal mission of the bee ! What pictures 
of sloping field and breezy upland, of summer 
lights and shadows and wilding flower, hide within 
the hexagons of transparent wax within which he 
stores his royal treasure ! 

" Snow to-morrow ! " This time the farmer's 
prophecy is an inspired one, and what dazzling 
visions of snow-covered field and wood greet our 
youngsterhood, from the dimmed panes of our 
window in the roadside gable, with the next dawn ! 
What a halo of utter whiteness lies spread out 
under the morning sun ! A veil of shimmering 
beauty lies over fence and highway, brown and 
unkempt yesterday, but to-day hidden under a 
mantle like the softest of swan's-down. Yester- 
day spoke only of harsh lines, of sharp angles, and 
rugged, wind-blown, leafless trees, of sombre tones 
and shadows, but to-day the world is made glori- 
ous with the first deep snow of the growing 
winter. The stealthily coming, noiselessly falling 



32 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

snow ! A rare, dainty footstep has this messenger 
of the Northland ; a royal ambassador is he, with 
such an army in his train. A greater than Mer- 
lin, the King of Enchanters, hath done this ; and 
what keen, life-giving, delicious atmosphere, what 
pulsating of blood-currents, what new bonds of 
strength, hath Earth stolen from the Wizard's 
robes ! It is a new earth indeed that young Win- 
ter has brought in a single night, with hosts of new 
hopes and pleasures. It is the most brilliant 
of Nature's transformation scenes, of which she 
has many. Nature is a master stage-setter, rich 
in expedients, fertile in conception, never disap- 
pointing her audiences, never guilty of tiresome 
repetition, but riant with color and passion and 
music. What a grand orchestra Nature provides 
for her Winter plays ! It is the Music of the 
Immortals. 

It is a short breakfast this morning, I assure 
you, and it is with unspeakable delight the broad- 
bladed snow-shovels, hunted up the day before, 
are brought out to clear the paths here and there 
about the farm-house yard ; first, to the old, faded- 
out doors — once painted red — of the wagon- 
house, which was then an important annex of the 
larger hog-house, the scene already of much 
clamorous squealing and grunting for the morning 
meal of pumpkin and boiled potato mush on the 
part of its swinish dwellers, all unconscious of the 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. T>2> 

premeditated visit of the professional "butcher" 
of the neighborhood on one of these bright winter 
mornings ; and then to the barn, where Chanticleer 
is holding high carnival with his excited flock. 
How clearly rang out his shrilly pitched, clarion 
notes, to lose themselves among the pines beyond 
the blueberry pasture, in a medley of echoes, each 
one as clearly cut and incisive as the glittering snow- 
crystals over which the homely sound floated. A 
clumsy, boisterous flight, and this Lord of the 
Roost has gained the highest gable on the barn, 
from whence he shouts a paean of conceit to the 
farm-houses up and down the valley, — a lordly chal- 
lenge, to be sure, and one. that brings swift answer, 
sharp and irate enough, from one of similar ilk. 
Below, the admiring hens flounder about the 
snowy deeps, not forgetting, in their pride, to 
indulge in a homely cadenza of approving clucks 
and cackling cachinnations at the daring spirit of 
the young Knight of Roosterhood. The Sir 
Knight went to market yesterday, so the harem 
has a new master, and I really believe these addle- 
pated hens are delighted. 

But the spell of enchantment has departed from 
our shovels ere half the work is done. Mittens 
are wringing wet, and the snow has grown heavy. 
The path to the barns seemed never so long be- 
fore. Whizz-z-z! and a snowball comes flying 
through the air ; the aching back is forgotten, 



34 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

and the snowy missiles come and go until, almost 
out of breath with our pelting of each other, by- 
one unlucky aim, the pantry window proves the 
better target, and smash goes a snowball clean 
through a single pane and over the sanded floor, 
leaving its trail of recent disaster, with many a 
tell-tale mark, upon the drift-piled window-sill. 
I do not pity my mate in his misfortune, for he is 
a larger boy, by three years, and apt to domineer 
at times ; nor are his snowballs or his ways sa- 
vored with gentleness. If somewhat coarse and 
rude, he is a fairly good fellow ; if an unconscion- 
able shirk about the farm, he is an adept at 
trouting and snaring rabbits -and partridges. I 
learned more of the world's doubtful philosophies 
from him than my mother dreamed existed in a 
boy's mind, of those days ; but the accident re- 
calls us to the work of clearing the paths to the 
barns, nor are our minds idle as we await, with 
silent trepidation, the sharp reproof that, we feel, 
is hanging over our heads, and that will be visited 
upon the culprits, when some household errand im- 
pels mother to the scene of her disturbed milk- 
pans and yellow cheese shelves. We are, no doubt, 
in disgrace for the whole day, for a grieved look 
in mother's brown eyes hurts more than open re- 
buke ; and as for my father, I dreaded his puri- 
tanic severity, which, not often, but sometimes, 
found expression in what he considered wholesome 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 35 

chastisement. " Spare the rod and spoil the 
child " is one of the essentials in his rugged 
creed ; and the rod, in his hand, is conscien- 
tiously a rod of correction. For all that, he is a 
magnificently just man, with big, generous heart, 
and scrupulously honest to his neighbor as to 
himself, administering punishment, when it is 
needful, from a sense of duty alone. I am afraid 
the victim too often harbored in his heart the 
opposite of repentance. 

I do not believe in punishing children in fault 
unwittingly, perhaps, but never when the down- 
right evil intent is absent as an element in the 
misdemeanor. Corporal . punishment for childish 
misdemeanors is a mistaken idea, morally wrong, 
and oftentimes almost criminal where such retri- 
bution is tinged with the slightest coloring of ill 
concealed vexation, and really so where there is 
an intemperate display of irritation. Children 
reason with ready intellects, and resent the inflic- 
tion of pain with many an unspoken anathema of 
smothered anger. To whip and torture is a brut- 
ish custom, the relic of a barbarity that finds no 
excuse for its existence in modern civilization, 
and of an age when men found no better pastime 
than the whipping of helpless women into subjec- 
tion. It is gratifying to know that in all the 
advanced systems of public instruction this idea is 
accepted and adopted as a part of the written 



36 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

code ; but, in those days of which I write, retribu- 
tion followed swiftly upon the discovery of wrong- 
doing, as the outcome of the religious training of 
the times. 

The doctrine of eternal punishment was a 
familiar one in the household ; it was the ogre of 
my boyhood, dogging my footsteps from the hour 
of my waking to when 

" The bull's-eye watch that hung in view," 

upon its nail above the narrow mantel, perched 
high up in the huge jamb of the old-fashioned fire- 
place, 

" Ticking its weary circuit through, 
Pointed with mutely warning sign 
Its black hand to the hour of nine," — 

nor even then did the sleuth-hound of this morbid 
fear depart. Never was there a theologic discus- 
sion indulged in beside the broad hearth, and 
there were many, but across its broadest thought 
could be traced, in lurid lines, the terrors of bot- 
tomless pits and lakes of liquid fire for erring 
humanity, while heaven was the blest retreat — 

" Where Sabbaths never end " — 

for the predestined and elect ; but who were the 
elect, seemed ever the uppermost and troublous 
question. It was an unsatisfactory ending that 
came with every closing argument, pro or con. The 
Devil lurked behind a host of innocent diversions, 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 37 

ready to entrap the unwary ; nor was it hardly safe 
to think, for he who had a thought the fulfilment 
of which was error and wickedness was, by the 
creed, as much damned as he who sinned in deed. 
It was certainly a narrow, uncomfortable state of 
mind for a juvenile to be in, and it is no wonder 
that children grew fearful of their own shadows 
after nightfall, and plunged their heads beneath 
their pillows at bed-time, to escape possible vis- 
ions of " bogies " and the " black-man " the Devil 
was like to send to them. 

The world of religious thought may be no wiser, 
but it is vastly more lenient and better now than 
then ; and if men will engage in acrid controversy 
over old forms of religious beliefs, forgetful in 
part of the real essentials of true Christian living, 
there are those who realize that the real fruitage 
of human endeavor is gathered day by day, and 
whose creed consists in living the true life to-day, 
and letting the morrow take care of itself. The 
Maker of so beautiful a world is more a being of 
infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness than narrow- 
minded sect has yet realized. God knows no sect, 
no controversy. " Except ye be as little chil- 
dren " means more than dogma or creed ; and if 
children are winning more consideration, are 
being taught to get the most they can out of 
child-life, the future is one of great promise, with 
the only danger impending of too much child- 



38 AN OLD-FASHIONED' FESTIVAL. 

wisdom and precocity. Childish instincts are 
seldom at fault. Nature is a generous tutor, and, 
with a few judicious aids at the hands of humanity, 
a safe one. 

As to the broken window in the pantry, if there 
was ever a discovery of our folly, nothing was 
said of it then or ever afterward, though the day 
was well through before our consciences were 
eased to any degree, or our fears abated, but even 
they did not retard our sport or dampen our 
enthusiasm at being a part of this 

"... universe of sky and snow," — 

and which Whittier has, with loving, tender touch, 
made idyllic, throwing about the homely country, 
home the rarest of reminiscent charm. We saw 
with him 

" The old familiar sights of ours," — 

and which, under the spell of the Magician of the 
Snow, had been metamorphosed into 

" Marvellous shapes : strange domes and towers 
Rose up where sty or corn-crib stood, 
Or garden-wall, or belt of wood ; 
A smooth, white mound the brush-pile showed, 
A fenceless drift what once was road ; 
The bridle-post an old man sat 
With loose-flung coat and high cocked hat : 
The well-curb had a Chinese roof; 
And even the long sweep, high aloof, 
In its slant splendor seemed to tell 
Of Pisa's leaning; miracle." 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 2>9 

The broad roofs of the barns, built over two 
generations ago, their shingles of yellow-hearted 
pumpkin-pine, half as ancient, and that were riven 
by hand, one at a time, down in the old meadow- 
lot, o-ray with moss, sombre-hued, worn thin and 
deeply furrowed with many a pelting of equinoc- 
tial storm, shrunken and creviced by one midsum- 
mer drought after another, are glorified in their 
panoply of white, and radiantly beautiful in the 
sunshine of this bright morning, with every snow- 
crystal a jewel set amid a glittering host of its fel- 
lows. The northward-looking gables are frescoed 
with countless frosty pellicles, and are draped with 
cloth of rarest silver. The farm-house chimneys, 
ruddy-colored and dusky-mounted, are the more 
suggestive of comfort as they peer over the snow- 
capped ridge-pole, their blue smokes scarcely less 
blue than the cloudless sky. The pasture-birches 
are bent double under the common burden of win- 
ter, their level acres of branch and twig blended 
and interlaced with all of Nature's intricate cun- 
ning, a sea of frozen tracery lying marvellously 
still under the beetling cliffs of snow-laden pines 
at their farther margin, while eastward the hill- 
slopes rise like huge dunes, white and treeless. 
South and west, below the trough of the highway, 
trackless as yet, the lowlands reach away beyond 
the orchards, into seemingly illimitable forests. It 
is a most fascinating picture, with more of splendor 



40 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

than lives in the wonderful tales of any imaginary 
story-teller. It is a real fairy-land, with hosts of 
winged sprites, viewless and unseen, hiding in 
every nook and cranny of fence and wall and shad- 
owy woodland. What a still, windless morning ! 
The air is palpitating with new life and exhilara- 
tion. How different from the witchery of June, 
and yet not less delightful, this vision of spotless 
purity ! Not a breath of wind, not a sound of earth, 
mars our transport of feeling, and it were not hard 
to imagine the music of the spheres, in the deep 
silence. Such a day as this impels me to believe 
that there is such a thing as the music of silence, 
audible only to the soul, and blessed is he who 
may fall within the spell of such glorious harmo- 
nies as the Supernal Composer has written within 
this snow-bound manuscript of Nature. What a 
sense of the utter grossness of humanity comes 
over one in the midst of such immaculateness of 
earth ! Moreover, what a comforting thought that 
humanity shall be purged of its uncleanliness, to 
be clothed likewise, with immaculate purity ! One 
must needs be soulless who is not stirred to the 
depths, whose heart does not follow with rhythmic 
beat the spirit-songs of Winter's new-born loveli- 
ness. It is Beauty snow-bound. 

But our scant breakfast has left us hungry after 
our task, and down we go through the long well- 
room, stamping the snow from our thick boots of 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 4I 

domestic cowhide on the way. How eagerly we 
drink of the brimming bucket that hangs at the 
top of the curb every day in the year ! Slowly the 
box of stone ballast in the corner of the high curb 
goes up, as hand over hand the stout bucket of 
oak, with swivelled iron bail and chain, is lowered 
into the deeps of the well, while I sing the 
refrain, — 

" Round like an apple, 

Deep like a cup ; 
All the King's oxen 
Can't pull it up," — 

and with what wheezy, creaking song of com- 
plaining the big wooden wheel overhead pulls 
its sparkling, dripping burden to the icy shelf, 
as the ballast swiftly returns to its resting-place 
with a dull thud, as if of satisfaction that its 
labor is so soon over ! Hosts of rare memories 
cluster about this old-fashioned curb — memories 
of the gray stone jug, with its spray of four-leaved 
clover painted in blue upon its side, with just a 
glimmer of summer sunshine flashing from its 
gray glazing, that has scraped the acquaintance 
of many a fragrant hay-cock or bunch of new- 
mown clover. What rhymes, learned of the rust- 
ling corn-leaves on the uplands, or of the bearded 
rye hidden in the shadows of the blackened 
stumps in the old rick by the woods, has it re- 
peated to me, as its waters, with many a soft- 



42 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

voiced gurgle and airy bubble, found their way 
into its unrevealed recesses through the old tin 
tunnel ! Not the less delicious was the coolness 
that came with the application of its soft waters 
to my face, hot and dusty from the glaring heats 
of the hay-field, than was the ruddy glow healthful 
it left upon my cheek of a cold, stinging morning. 
It may not have been the elixir vitce, which has 
baffled the search of more than one deluded alche- 
mist ; but that it possessed the balm of health- 
giving, rare and rugged, I have never doubted. 
It is only at long intervals, in these later years, 
that I may look into its dusky mirror, o'er the 
self-same curb of boyhood : the old boy-face is 
gone, and another has taken its place ; but a 
drink ot its sparkling nectar, from its northern- 
most corner, is pleasure unalloyed. Oh, the 
magic of such memories ! 

A hearty drink after shovelling the paths is but 
an appetizing preliminary to the lunch of dough- 
nuts and real country-cheese, colored with here 
and there a petal of yellow marigold, but barely 
touched and rarely flavored with a bit of greenish 
mould, with its dessert of ruddy-cheeked Nodhead, 
the rarest of all rare fall apples. How we watch 
for the first sleigh down the hill, or from over the 
knoll beyond the old well-sweep, forsaken now for 
the newer well at the house ! How the fire 
crackles and roars in the huge brick oven, as if 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 43 

full of glee that its simmering- heats are so soon 
to transmute the concoctions of the kitchen into 
the most famous repast of the whole year ! But 
hark ! — sleigh-bells, sure enough, and we rush to 
the door in time to greet our nearest neighbor, 
who has taken an early start to church on the hill, 
with the query, " How's the slippin' ?" 

" Fust-rate, fust-rate. The snow's come damp, 
and treads tip-top. Goin' to meetin', ain't yer ? 
S'pose yer know the old pa'son's ter preach the 
Thanksgivin' sarmon." 

With a mysteriously evolved cluck, our neighbor 
had whipped up, and was off on his four-mile 
journey, whither father and myself are to follow 
later. 

The Governor's proclamation had been read 
from the pulpit the preceding Sabbath, and the 
appointment for the usual church-service had been 
made ; but we did not know that our old pas- 
tor, who had been retired a half-decade in favor of 
a younger man, was to occupy the pulpit, — and 
what a pulpit it was ! But the oven was raked 
clear of its blazing sticks, and the ruddy coals, 
which were deposited in the fireplace adjacent, 
where they were left to cool, and fade out into 
dusky bits of carbon, while mother dressed me for 
church, completing the operation with the pinning- 
on of a linen collar, so stiff with starch that it 
seemed more an instrument of torture and utter 



44 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

discomfort than anything which gave to my out- 
fit an added comeliness. I have no doubt that 
with my wide-flaring collar, and which obliged me 
to carry my head with much circumspection if I 
wished to take any comfort at all, and my oddly 
fashioned clothing, I looked the prim little Puritan 
to perfection. 

Meanwhile, the antiquated sleigh, with back high 
enough to hide its occupants from all observation 
from behind, and which looked oddly out of date 
forty years ago, though at one time the pride of 
the town aristocracy, consorting bravely with wig, 
and perchance three-cornered hat, with knee- 
buckles of silver and brilliantly colored waistcoat, 
and preserving its caste more by its aspect of 
severe discomfort and sharp angularity than by 
any inherent quality of grace or beauty which one 
might discover in its plain, box-like body, its 
clumsy runners low-down and stub-nosed, with 
thills long and straight, had been unslung from its 
summer moorings, and was already at the door. 
Fine clothes were not much thought of in those 
times. If what was worn was only neat and 
cleanly, and, if patched, if the patching was skil- 
fully done, it did not matter, so long as it was 
known that the wearer had a " Sunday-go-to-meetin' 
suit " hung carefully away in the cedar closet of 
the old farm-house for funerals and extra solemn 
occasions. This suit was most generally of black 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 45 

broadcloth or doeskin, and which, donned for any- 
special occasion, looked as if it were made for some 
other person than the wearer. The style was 
always more or less of the nondescript order ; but 
what did that matter, with such rugged manhood 
as theirs ! Dollars counted for more than dress, 
as they always have. It took but a moment for 
father to put on his tall dickey and black silk 
stock, and somewhat faded blue surtout, which was 
a part of his wedding outfit, in all of which opera- 
tions mother lent her welcome assistance, with 
many an expression of solicitude and wifely pride. 
Donning his silk stove-pipe hat, which was of 
ample dimensions, and about my own age, if family 
chronicles are to be relied upon, and over all his 
wolfskin overcoat, we were soon on our way to 
the old white church. Judge, the family horse, 
evidently well aware of his destination, comported 
himself with rare dignity on church-days, though 
at other times he was wont to be more or less 
restive under the harness. His rich bay color, and 
silver mane and tail, long and glossy, bespoke his 
Morgan ancestry, sadly groomed as he was for the 
most part of the time ; but we were great friends, 
as many a bareback ride and pasture canter could 
testify. I always enjoyed the ride over the hills, 
through the fresh mountain-air, snugly tucked 
about with warm buffalo-robes, that smelled of 
camphor and careful housing, as from every hill- 



46 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

top new visions of loveliness came and went in 
slow succession. 

The old church-bell rings out with staid yet 
cheery welcome as we mount the last hill, and 
what a transition from the brilliance and sparkle 
of the snow-covered landscape without to the 
sombre plainness and narrow, high-backed pews 
within the church. From the little square pulpit, 
perched upon the top of a lofty dais, with its steep 
flight of steps on either side, the minister looked 
out over the silver rims of his ancient spectacles, 
for a moment, upon his audience, and through the 
silence I could hear the brisk crackle of the burn- 
ing wood in the big air-tight stoves by the doors 
that opened into the church directly under the 
singing-seats ; and from the long rusty funnels 
that ran the whole length of the church, and that 
were suspended from the ceiling just over the two 
broad aisles, came puffs of transparent blue smoke, 
that made the air pungent to nose and eye, until 
the people, with sundry nods and winks to the 
deacons, had forced one of these slow but worthy 
functionaries to lower the top sash of the window 
over some unoccupied wing-pews. Then came a 
brief invocation, then the reading of the opening 
hymn, which was sung, with lusty vigor of high- 
pitched treble and rugged bass, by " y e big choir ; " 
after which a selection of Scripture was read, with 
trembling earnestness of voice, not ill befitting the 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 47 

gray-haired man of eighty or more. The "long 
prayer" followed, which, breathing of rare trust 
and devotion, was of interminable length, and I 
wondered, with a boy's mind, whether God heard 
all he said. With what pride and dignity was the 
broadly folded sheet, whereon was printed the 
proclamation of the Governor, unfolded and read 
after the singing of the second hymn, to be sup- 
plemented at its close with the pious, " God save 
the State of ! " 

How vividly came to mind the staid, sober 
people of Plymouth wending their way to their 
rude log-church, with brave Captain Standish at 
their head, all keeping, step to the beat of the 
drum, with Governor Bradford and William Brew- 
ster next, and then the settlers in their order, 
and not alone ; for Massasoit was there with his 
Indian braves to invoke the blessing of Almighty 
upon this first Thanksgiving festival, which was 
prolonged for the space of three days, the origin 
of this beautiful New England custom. But what 
a sermon followed, near two good hours in length ! — 
But the people were delighted, and the entire con- 
gregation joined in the closing hymn, — "Lord, 
dismiss us with thy blessing." 

What an outburst of sound it was that preceded 
that benediction, the last the old man ever uttered, 
with hands outspread above his congregation ! I 
remember, as my father went to him with heart-felt 



48 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

greeting after the service, how he placed a trem- 
bling hand upon my head, with the wish that I 
might be as good a man as my father. What 
simple times those were ! It is with a rare pleasure 
that I meet with anything which possesses a hint 
of the homely sincerity, the rare unselfishness, and 
humble living, that make 

" These Flemish pictures of old days " 

so delightful to recall. 

II. 

The Thanksgiving dinner in New England is 
an occasion of rare and long anticipated pleasure, 
occurring, as it does, during that interregnum of 
almost enforced idleness among the distinctively 
farming people. Of all lasting pleasures, I have 
found those of a rural character are to be counted 
first and chiefest. It may be because they appeal 
to me more strongly, or arouse larger sympathies ; 
but I find great charm in their simplicity as well. 
They do not ask any return ; they require no out- 
lay in advance, nor do their fullest enjoyments 
impose any penalty of weariness or debilitation, 
but they are rather an antidote to such. The true 
farmer is one of Nature's children, and, broad- 
chested and brawny as he is, overbrimming with 
the richest sort of vitality, as his independent way 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 49 

of living and out-of-door pursuits must needs make 
him, he is none the less keen in every manly sen- 
sibility, none the less clear in his reasoning or the 
less quick in his instincts. The coarser the cov- 
ering to the nut, the sweeter the meat, and a 
homespun garb more often hides a big heart and 
a clear intellect than not. 

Reasoning from natural phenomena is the road 
over which common-sense rides from a lower plane 
to a higher. The greater the fund of common- 
sense, the more happiness there is in life, how- 
ever simple it may be, for its possessor. Nature 
is the great tonic, full of sparkling, exhilarat- 
ing quality from ruddy sunrise to ruddier sunset. 
Farm-life is of great variety, and not at all the 
humdrum sort of an existence it is thought, by 
some, to be. Who ever heard of a farmer to the 
manor born, or his thrifty housewife being trou- 
bled with the fashionably termed ennui, the dis- 
ease of idleness ? There is neither time nor 
disposition to indulge in splenetic complaints, in 
this mixture of out-door and in-door life, every 
moment of which is pulsating with robust exhil- 
aration, whether it is in the searching after and 
the plucking of the sweet-smelling arbutus-blossom 
among the low evergreens in the pastures, with 
the maples showering clown upon you their blood- 
stained flowers with every vibration of the atmos- 
phere, the driving of the team afield with plough 



50 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

or harrow, or the scattering of the grain across the 
mellow last-year's corn-lands ; the spring days are 
overflowing with a freshness and promise and 
bursting beauty that ever lie within the rarer 
enjoyments of anticipation, — anticipation that is 
richest in its fulfilment. 

June blossoms into the wanton luxuriance of 
the riper summer days, to fade away, almost im- 
perceptibly, into the nut-brown days of October, 
the season of falling leaves and garish woodlands, 
when Nature has come to one of her resting- 
places, and when, to the dwellers in the old farm- 
house, the summer work and harvesting is com- 
pleted. These days are the breathing-spaces for 
the farm-folks, young and old, with their short 
allowance of sunshine and long, fire-lighted even- 
ings, interspersed with many a neighborly visit ; 
with their gatherings at the cross-roads post-office 
for the mail, which always comes with the thicken- 
ing shadows, that follow the sundown so swiftly, 
and where, with the innocent but Yankee-like 
diversion of whittling at box or bench, with neigh- 
borly gossip amid clouds of pipe-smoke, and with 
the reading aloud, by some prodigy of the "dees- 
trick school," of the single copy of the daily paper, 
which the village squire or some local politician 
feels it his duty to provide for his constituency, 
the evening is fairly well spent. 

Thanksgiving day is a long anticipated occasion 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 5 1 

of festivity. The poultry are sedulously watched 
and fed, those of rufous plumage being especially 
devoted to the executioner and market-man, with 
some of the older " fry " among the Cochins, 
Brajimas, and Plymouth Rocks ; the largest, fair- 
est fruits from the orchards are selected for its 
desserts ; the sage and mint for the stuffing of the 
big turkey are picked in blossoming time, and 
carefully laid away beyond the touch of profane 
hand ; there are mysterious errands to the " corner 
grocery," and many a brown-paper parcel was 
smuggled into the house-pantry ; nothing was for- 
gotten, not even the powder and shot for the old 
Queen's-arm musket was overlooked, with which 
to shoot the partridges and squirrels for the pot- 
pie, which was always set upon the table in the 
big ten-quart tin pan in which it was baked, its top- 
crust rising like a dome from its flaring rim, deli- 
cately browned, and flaky as only mother knew 
how to make it. The hard, puckery fruit from the 
native pear-tree, that grew in the gap in the pas- 
ture-fence, already of uncertain age, has been pre- 
served in the best Cienfuegos, and the new cider 
has been boiled to the proper consistency and 
flavor for sauce of quartered sugar-sweetings, that 
hung all summer long over the wood-pile behind 
the shed, to drop one by one, through the mellow 
haze of the short October afternoons, into the 
debris of dead thistles and beechen chips below, 



52 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

with many a cut and bruise upon their golden 
rinds. It was a rare relish, and took the place of 
the cranberry, for there was not a cranberry-bog 
within fifteen miles of the home-farm. 

The ground under the butternut-trees has been 
scoured for the twentieth time, in search of the 
stray, late fallen nuts, with their green-hued, sticky 
rinds. The long, oval-shaped butternut-leaves 
have fallen long since, but some of the nuts are 
obstinate enough, and mind neither wind nor rain, 
and only a sturdy climb and persistent clubbing of 
the farthermost branches will dislodge them from 
their lofty perch, but all the more tempting to 
our boyish effort ; but the nuts are beaten off or 
shaken to the ground, and down I slide to. the foot 
of the tree, to find, how provoking ! that, with 
all my agility and lynx-eyed peering about the 
leafless branches, I had missed a half-score of 
them. What a taunting air those few odd butter- 
nuts on the topmost twigs had, as if they were 
saying, " Come and get me if you dare ! " I let 
them remain, well satisfied that Jack Frost would 
knock them off if I did not. There were no shag- 
barks on the home-lot, though I knew of some on 
a neighboring farm, but which were preempted by 
their owners, for home-consumption ; but mother 
and I have raked the beechen carpetings of the 
woods by the square rod, with our nimble fingers, 
in company with the squirrels, red and gray, and 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 53 

as well the half-crazy chipmonk, who always blew a 
shrill whistle whenever he was excited or alarmed, 
dodging for the nearest hole as if his life depended 
upon the rapidity of his exertion. 

The chipmonk is an easily domesticated fellow, 
running about the house with the utmost freedom, 
upstairs and down ; making cosey nests out of the 
window-draperies, rustling with a busy sort of 
noise about the paper-basket, now upon the top of 
the easy-chair, and now in the corner, munching 
at a nut he has been fortunate enough to discover 
about the pantry. How many snares the little 
fellow escaped before he fell into my own I do 
not know, but one bright, sunny day in the early 
fall some one about the house left the outer door 
ajar, and Mr. Chipmonk left most unceremoni- 
ously, and from that day to this I have not seen 
him to recognize him, but I rather liked his inde- 
pendence and spirit. To be under the slightest 
obligation to some people is certainly very uncom- 
fortable, not to say downright disagreeable ; and 
yet as I recall the chipmonk's sharp whistle he 
was constantly saying, " Let me go ! let me go ! I 
say, siree, let me go ! " between his chattering 
teeth. We were not a little entertained by the 
acrobatic exhibitions, given from time to time, 
through the bright days we frequented the woods, 
by the big gray squirrels, that made their high- 
ways among the interlacing hemlock-tops, with 



54 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

many a sharp bark and daring leap. But they 
were more shy than the smaller species, and 
less numerous. We would meet them in the late 
afternoon, racing down over the pasture into the 
woods, with a load of corn stolen from the uncut 
harvest on the hill-side. They came even into the 
corn-crib in the deep of winter, and, for all I know, 
slept there ; but these forest-children did not 
interfere much with our beech-nutting, as the 
ample salt-bag hanging from the drying-pole in 
the kitchen abundantly proved. What magnifi- 
cent days came with every frosty morning ! Each 
day was a huge topaz set with bright, starlit nights 
flooded with all the glory of the harvest-moon. 
But the husbandman has not been idle. There 
has been no lagging about the farm since the boys 
began to pull and stack the beans in the corn, 
binding the stakes at the bottom with the slender 
withes of witch-hazel, with green-stained, rough- 
ened hands, but the tops were always finished by 
father. 

The potato-vines have grown rusty lying so long 
in the summer sun, and at last, dead and dry, are 
pulled from the long, parallel ridges of mellowed 
soil, and with bright-bladed hoe the white and 
purple tubers are thrown out to dry before being 
carted to the cellar and piled away beneath the 
stone arches that hold up the big, wide hearth, 
with its heavy chimney-stack. The corn-crop has 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 55 

been gathered into the husking-pile and deftly 
stripped of its yellow sheaths and brown silks, 
and has been carried in baskets to the corn-loft in 
the long attic of the woodshed, for the vagrant 
mice to feed upon the winter through. The 
silver-skins in the onion-patch have been pulled 
and carted with the other field-produce into the 
cellar, to keep company with the potatoes, and 
where there are also ample bins of rutabagas 
and Dutch cabbages dressed in royal purple, with 
blood-red beets in quantities for the housewife, 
and where there are bushels of carrots, long and 
tapering, each one an ingot of ruddy gold, for the 
calves, and an occasional boiled dinner of country- 
pork or well salted beef. In the apple-room, in 
the southerly corner, are bushels upon bushels of 
apples, piled high against its four walls, and which 
bespeak ample store for winter days. The thresh- 
ers have made their annual pilgrimage, and the 
sun-blackened beans, dumped from the old ox-cart 
into the barn-floors, have been beaten into sheer 
chaff by the farm-hands, with their old-fashioned, 
hollow-sounding flails, and afterward winnowed 
in the wind, or blown clean in the ancient, yellow 
winnowing-machine, — and a queer bit of farm- 
mechanism it was, with its immense hopper and 
wooden wheel with white-oak pin driven squarely 
into its outer side, and a clumsy crank-pin it was, 
with channelled rim for the leather band that 



56 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

drove the blower ! As wheezy and full of clatter 
as any old-fashioned thing could be, we children 
thought it a wonderful plaything, catching in our 
hands the snowy white treasure as it came pour- 
ing down the little spout on the side where the 
wheels, with their attachment of slender wooden 
bar, were jerking the sieves rapidly to one side 
and the other. 

Rare dreams of childish romance filled our 
thought as we caught an imaginary glimpse of 
Jack the Giant-killer, hovering in the thick dust 
of pod and stalk, gathering in an ever-increasing 
pile, to be scattered by father's thick leathern 
boots over the floor, when its accumulation inter- 
fered with the sieves. Many a song was evolved 
from the whir of the blower, and written upon an 
imaginary staff in the heart, to be sung in the 
silence of after years ; and what sweet pastorals 
they were ! The cattle thought these broken pods 
delicious, as I imagined from their eager snuff- 
ing and hungry looks whenever a bunch of bean- 
stalks came in their way, and the sheep munched 
away at them as busily as if it were the last 
"foddering" from the scaffold. I delighted in the 
" foddering " of these barn-people whenever I went 
among them, and if I did not give them something 
good from the mows, the " mild reproach " that 
looked from their wide-open, ruminant eyes kept 
even pace with me up the hill to the house. 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 57 

The hollowed pathways of the mower across 
the wheat-field have been marked with many a 
parallel track, left by the broadly tired wheels of 
the ox-cart, and gleaned bare of stones, which 
have been built into substantial cobble-wall about 
the farm, preparatory to the mowing of the rank 
clover which will spring up next year. A good 
solid wall is the pride of the thrifty farmer, and 
a most excellent barrier against invasion from 
the cattle of a not over-solicitous neighbor : but 
cattle are half-human in their inclinations to in- 
dulge in mischief, and no more innocent-looking 
culprit can be conceived than one of these adepts 
at jumping stone walls and tearing-down of fences. 
The cornfield or clover-patch on the other side of 
the fence are covered with tempting sweetness, 
and I doubt if ever human heart swelled with 
more passionate desire to revel in forbidden 
pleasures than that of a certain steer once appur- 
tenant to the farm domain, and to whom the 
jumping of a five-rail fence was mere pastime. 
For a bovine vaulter he was unexcelled in daring 
and agility ; for, blind him as you would, with the 
wooden placard of his thieving disposition, the 
broad strip of pine board across his forehead, and 
lash it with stoutly knotted thongs to his ample 
horns, the result was much the same. A toss of the 
head, and up would go the " blind " for a few 
seconds. The swift survey is followed by a leap 



58 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

as graceful as that of a deer ; down he alights in 
the rank corn or blossoming clover, to feed at his 
leisure, to return to the pasture later, by the way 
of his coming, if, perchance, he be not discov- 
ered, the envy and admiration of the herd. 

The expiation of his agrarian crime is something 
of which he is utterly unmindful ; so, after a too 
frequent indulgence in this seductive and adven- 
turous sport, he is caught in the act, and, without 
the formality of a hearing, condemned to a soli- 
tary confinement in the deserted tie-up until the 
time of his execution, with only the musty memo- 
ries of its winter-crowded stanchions to keep him 
company, and without the possibility of a merciful 
reprieve from the hungry maw of the family beef- 
barrel, now hidden within the damp mould and 
sinister shadows of the cellar-stairs ; but with how 
much or how little justice, no one stops to ques- 
tion — there is no mercy for a thieving animal, 
in the otherwise generous heart of the farmer. 
A cattle jury would, no doubt, acquit the prisoner 
without leaving the panel, in disregard of all 
human precedent, — I am inclined to think such a 
verdict would be a righteous one, — heavily taxed 
as they are by one sort of an impost after another, 
by farm-hand and dairy-maid, especially were all 
culprits as noble-looking and handsome as this 
Duke of Hereford, whose death was so igno- 
minious. 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 59 

The few acres of pasture-sward, fragrant with 
the low shrubbery of the sweet-fern, and odor- 
ous with scents of the humble pennyroyal, have 
been turned over for the spring sowing of oats. 
The huge breaking-up plough and its four oxen 
plodding with slow, steady movement along the 
crest of the pasture-knoll, sturdily yet sharply 
outlined against the low horizon of the sky, which 
makes the soft gray background, is a picture from 
the life, crisp and sketchy enough to attract the 
brush of a Landseer or a Bonheur, and over- 
brimming with values that have no approximate 
in art. It is a rare pleasure to follow with loi- 
tering footsteps after the ploughman. What a 
lazy pace it is ! but here is Strength. There is a 
picturesque touch to everything, even to the 
flapping of the loose sleeves of the farmer's cot- 
tonade shirt, as the breeze livens up a bit ; and 
the old, sun-browned felt hat, with its broad, flex- 
ible brim, blown stiffly up with every windy gust 
that sweeps over the slope, adds but another to 
the quaint characteristics of this pastoral episode 
of the late fall days. How evenly the sward is 
cut, and folded over against the edge of its neigh- 
bor ; and what a gloss this ironing of the glitter- 
ing ploughshare lends to the richly colored loam 
that has lain idle so long, for no one on the farm 
remembers when these acres, once the mowing- 
lands of the plantations, were seeded down, and 



60 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

the old wall that marked their eastern boundary- 
is, for the larger part, underground. 

These brown, sleek-haired oxen, with their rus- 
tic driver and stout ploughmen, their plodding on 
from furrow to furrow, well afield, in the mid-days 
of russet-cheeked October, make one of the rarest 
pictures in the book of seasons, and, in its rich 
suggestions of things that are yet to come, it has 
no equivalent in country life. The breaking-up 
plough is the platform of an incoming reform 
administration. Its promises are of rotations. 
Fern, and brake, and weeds of all sorts must 
vacate office at once. Hereafter crops of oats, 
potatoes, Indian corn, wheat and clover-blossoms, 
are to make the substance of the annual reports ; 
and the signs are that the administration is to be 
an active one. But these new lands must be 
fenced, and the slender maple-poles and hemlock- 
stakes have been " twitched " out of the woods 
and up the open slopes of the pasture, and along- 
side of the ploughed ground, for the new fence to 
be built in the spring, when the sowing is over, 
leaving a deeply furrowed trail of rufous color 
through the briars and mullein-stalks which thrive 
so luxuriantly there. Sometimes this upturning 
of the new planting-lands is done in June, so the 
land may lie fallow through the rest of the year, 
but the lolling, panting oxen move the more 
slowly through the hot days of opening summer. 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 6l 

After a nipping cold night what dainty, miniature- 
like mosques, with glistening dome and minaret, 
and strange shapes of crystallized beauty, the frost 
has built in the crevices of the furrows ! Here 
are mimic Fingal caves and castle-crags among 
their white forests, as wonderful as any that Nat- 
ure ever built, though her handiwork knows no 
end, nor is there any diminution of the charms 
with which the earlier seasons are invested, for 
out of change and decay come new birth and new 
beauty. 

After the fall ploughing comes a day or two at 
the cider-mill. The scattered piles of apples in 
the orchard have been gathered up from their 
grassy floors into the big cart and carted over the 
hilly highway to the barn-like structure just off 
the road that leads through a mile or more of 
tangled alder-bushes and swamp-elms to the head 
of the pond, along the farther shore of which is 
the home-farm. The black gables and sides of 
the old cider-mill are full of great cracks and badly 
worn by the storms of many winters. It is a 
slovenly-kept place in its surroundings of cold, 
boggy lands, as if the poorest and most worthless 
of the lands hereabouts were none too poor a set- 
ting for this otherwise dilapidated building, with 
its leaky roof and malodorous atmosphere. 

The presiding genius of this haunt of the rustic 
Gambrinus, barren of romance, and so utterly 



62 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

prosaic in its surroundings of low, flat lands and 
rambling red farm-house with its single towering 
elm, and at its back the meagre orchard, is a man 
stoutly built, with low, broad shoulders, whose 
half-closed eyes, keenly aglitter, and ruddy hirsute- 
ness, betrayed a somewhat selfish and calculating 
disposition ; a common enough quality, in these 
days of heartless competition, and always more to 
be avoided than cherished ; but the heart of this 
Autocrat of the Cider-press was a warm one, for all 
that, as many a barefooted urchin would have tes- 
tified, who with long rye straw drank to his fill of 
the liquid amber which was ever dripping when the 
big screws were down. As far away as those days 
are, I can even now see a group of youthful rustics 
leaning over the edge of the half-hogshead that sat 
close under the big press, their cheeks puffed out 
and ruddy with their exertion as they reach after 
the coveted drink of new cider. I hear the tim- 
bers creak as the men push the stout levers slowly 
around above the press, and the flow of this nec- 
tar of the orchard comes clearer and more musical 
as the " cheese " is pressed more compactly to- 
gether ! How the big, unwieldy screws — there 
were three of them — groaned and trembled as 
they were driven to their work! And when the 
" cheese " had been pressed dry, how deftly the 
men would " cut down " the solid cube of crushed 
apple and straw, with axe and spade, — "pumice," 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 6$ 

they called it, — to throw it one side, to make 
room for the new layers of apple, freshly ground, 
from the long trough under the grinding-mill, 
mixed with the clean yellow straw, from the barn- 
scaffold, and that is to yield new treasures for the 
homestead cellar. 

The brown pumice, thrown out the little door in 
the gable, was like a land of plenty to the wasps, 
never more harmless — fuddled, as I believe them 
to have been, at this Bacchanalian feast. The 
wandering bees did not refuse the sipping of this 
dainty ; and if any of them were unfortunate 
enough to go home in an intoxicated condition, 
and thereby bring scandal upon the heads of 
their respective families, they were to be excused, 
for the temptation was a grievous one. What 
mid-day orgies the flies held about the brown heap 
of refuse straw and apple, with the accompani- 
ment of a most hilarious buzzing ! After a frosty 
night, they no doubt thought it equal to iced 
champagne. Wasps, bees, or what not, they were 
a gloriously drunken company, and a disgrace to 
anything with wings. What a romance, another 
romance, this making of the cider was, among 
the bursting bins of scented fruit, with the dusty 
cobweb rafters overhead, their thick shadows 
lighted with here and there a bar of creviced 
gold, slanting down against the inner walls, with 
the slow-paced horse pulling the long, clumsy arm 



64 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

of the grinder round and round its narrow circuit, 
groaning under a constantly added burden from 
the bins ! But what a dirty, narrow yard was out- 
side, with its deeps of black mud, full of ruts, and 
hieroglyphic of wheel-track and hoof-print, and 
strewn with dead leaves from the orchard close 
by. A romance indeed that cannot be told upon 
a single page, the last act of which closes with 
the chill November nightfall, when the stoutly 
hooped oaken casks, filled to overbrimming, are 
tightly sealed, each bung being made more tight 
with many a carefully laid strip of yellow corn- 
husk, so that not a drop of this rustic-made cham- 
pagne shall escape on the journey homeward. 
The stars are out in the sky, never more, brilliant 
than on these fall nights, and never seeming so 
near to earth ; but another star comes in sight, 
low down among the orchard-trees, as the team 
climbs the slow rise of the highway, above the 
dim, gray line of which is the old square home- 
stead, with its windows aglow with the cheery 
brightness of the blazing hearth-fire within. 

" Back-sh ! 

"Put in thar ! put-in-tha — r!" and, with 
much vociferous exertion on the part of the team- 
ster, the oxen have backed the cart, with its heavy 
load, against the mouth of the granite-walled alley 
that leads to the cellar, where, by the glimmering- 
light of a whale-oil lantern, the clumsy cart-body 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 65 

is tipped up a bit from its like clumsy tongue ; the 
skids are put in place, and one after another the 
barrels are rolled into the warm cellar, to be 
"horsed up" a day or two later into their winter 
resting-places. The last cask is not unloaded be- 
fore a bung is started, and the long, clean straws, 
saved from the wheat scaffold before the threshers 
came, are forthcoming ; and, in a moment more, 
a trio of mouths are drawing deep pleasure from 
the nearest barrel. These straws pointed at 
something other than the quarter toward which 
the wind was setting. 

A few days later the wide cellar-doors are 
closed and barred on their inner side, not to be 
opened until the warm south winds of spring blow 
the dandelions into blossom. It was with much 
of interest and curiosity that my boyish eyes 
watched the battening of these doors with many 
a thick strip of old woollen material, until every 
crack and cranny through which the frost-sprites 
might enter were securely barricaded; and, as if 
this were not enough, the "pointing" all around 
with a coarse mortar of lime and sand, or with 
bright, yellow clay from the meadcw brock, with 
which many a chimney was built or bonded to- 
gether when lime was scarce or too expensive. 
The old settler was not less of a genius than an 
economist, and Nature was appealed to more often 
in those days than now for alternatives. Not only 



66 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

were the cellar-walls battened and plastered with- 
in, but they were sheltered without with thick 
layers of fragrant fir-boughs, which were extended 
entirely about the granite underpinning of the 
old house. Five months of winter, with as many 
feet of snow on a level for days, with the mercury 
at zero, and even below, for a whole fortnight or 
more, initiated a " spell" of cold, against the silent, 
unheralded approach of which the farmer could 
not be too vigilant ; but, after all precaution, the 
frost would creep in between the huge split stones 
in the cellar-wall, only to find the pipkins and 
potatoes well blanketed and beyond its reach. A 
frost-nipped potato at dinner was a delicacy to me 
in those days, tasting, as it did, something like the 
sweet tuber of the South ; it possessed an especial 
relish to my uneducated palate, though it was 
detested by the adult portion of the family. 

So, day by day, the steps are taken with slow 
certainty toward this goal of rest, when the har- 
vest-work is at last over, and everything made 
snug and .tight for the drifting snows and sleet- 
laden winds ; nor is it to be wondered at that the 
thrifty husbandman and his faithful helpmeet in 
the farm-house appreciate their well earned inter- 
regnum of resting days, and look forward to the 
celebration of this Autumn festival with all its 
devoutness, its attendant jollity and good eating, 
with a joyous anticipation. 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 67 

It is a glorious ride homeward from the old 
church, with the sun just past its meridian, while 
always before, and often below the line of vision, 
lies spread out the white, silent picture of the 
dazzling winter landscape. There is a magic in 
the snow ; for the familiar roadway, hemmed in 
with bramble of scrub-apple and blackberry-briar, 
with alder, and birch, and elderberry-bush, has 
grown strangely unfamiliar over-night. Nothing 
retains its former individuality, for the fences are 
hidden under a heap of snowy covering, and even 
the trees have lost shape and outline. Everything 
seems to have undergone a subtle change, as of 
diminution. The pine-woods do not seem so lofty 
as on yester-afternoon, but look discouraged and 
cast down under their damp, clinging burden. 
The trees in the orchard are shrunken and dwarfed- 
looking, making but a beggarly appearance, with 
their misshapen trunks and ragged, out-at-the- 
elbow-like limbs ; the farm-buildings have a look 
as if they were slowly settling into the ground ; 
the woodlands have stolen upon us unawares in a 
single night, and seem but a step away across the 
narrowed pastures. The sleigh-tracks, scarce a 
yard apart, along the broad highway, lend a reality 
to the illusion, while the horizon seems nearer 
and the blue skies lower down than ever. There 
is a sense of compactness, as if Nature had packed 
her belongings in one huge trunk, and was about 



68 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL,. 

to take a long journey ; a feeling that is much 
intensified as one looks from the cosey hearth-fire 
out upon the embargo of Winter. There is a rare 
sense of shelter in the all-enveloping snow, and, no 
matter how hard the sleet beats against the win- 
dow-pane, with a glowing wood fire on the ample 
hearth, and the cheery company of home-folk, and 
a few chosen companions from the book-shelf, one 
can be a philosopher with small effort : and what 
would seem a dismal howling of the storm is 
transposed into the tuneful music of the elements. 
But the farm-house is in sight, and, with an extra 
shake of the string of deep-sounding bells by the 
horse, as if to add emphasis to his satisfaction, the 
house-door is reached, wide-open, and within which 
is standing a goodly-looking woman, her mild eyes 
of softest brown just a bit disturbed, as if tired 
with over-waiting ; her long apron of checked or 
blue mixed homespun stuff thrown carelessly about 
her head, down upon which noiselessly drift troops 
of glittering snow-crystals through the sunlit air, 
blown from the low roof above, as she urges 
the travellers to "be quick with the horse," as 
dinner has been "waiting too long already." 
Premising that my reader is aware of the womanly 
capacity for asking questions when information is 
desired, the string of questions that greeted the 
advent of two hungry church-goers into the big 
kitchen, as, stamping the snow from their boots, 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 69 

and pulling themselves out of their overcoats, they 
made ready for dinner, was of the most entertain- 
ing character — to the inquirer, at least. But what 
a dinner ! for there was nothing lacking from the 
menu which made up this old-fashioned repast that 
the farm produced, all done to a turn, and steaming 
hot, and fit to set before a king! 

Here is the menu, if you have the curiosity to 
see it as others did, glancing here and there 
about the table literally creaking under its burden 
of good things : — cold roast spare rib, pig brown 
and crisp, and roast turkey, juicy and tender, 
plied full to bursting with incomparable stuffing, 
for removes ; — potatoes baked in the hot ashes of 
the open fire, white, fine, and dry like meal, with 
real giblet-sauce ; an accompanying big dish of 
boiled onions, indispensable upon such occasions ; 
boiled cider-apple sauce and cold slaw of Dutch 
cabbage, for entrees. Then, there was the big pot- 
pie of game, mayhap of gray squirrel and par- 
tridge ; the old-fashioned suet pudding, boiled in a 
bag of coarse cloth, a dainty much prized in those 
days ; another pudding, stuck full of plums as big 
as any that little Jack Horner found in his own as 
he sat in his chimney-corner ; and such rare apple 
and mince pies ! For dessert there was the light- 
est, whitest of cream biscuit ; the rarest of golden 
butter, made before the days of artificial coloring, 
kept company with a plate of amber-colored honey 



70 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

fresh from the hives ; doughnuts and cheese in 
abundance, and at each plate a bumping glass of 
newly made cider, with just a discernible " tang" 
which was the only drinkable, outside the regula- 
tion tea and coffee. It was a rare good dinner, in 
its setting of blue, antique-patterned china, with 
knives and forks of steel, scoured to such brill- 
iance as " Bristol brick " and hard rubbing could 
lend, with clumsy handles of plain buck-horn, 
rough, unpretentious, and homely ; a dinner, the 
rugged cheer and unstinted eating of which was 
most excellent proof of the appreciation in which 
the bounty of the well tilled fields was held, and 
which, if it perchance entailed upon its partakers 
a transient feeling of discomfort, was but a repeti- 
tion of what had occurred upon many a past anni- 
versary of this feast-day of the Forefathers. 

Perhaps time, like distance, may lend its 
enchantments to my thought, but, dear as the 
old place has come to be during these fast-going 
years, never were the home-lands dearer than 
when, aglow with boyish ardor and 'curiosity, I 
made a part of Nature's rustic class, for there was 
not a tree in the old orchard, the lichen-stained 
bark of which I had not caressed with many an 
ardent hug and sturdy climb ; and in the woods 
above the meadow, or beyond the hill by the pond, 
there was not an unfamiliar path or trail, and the 
larger trees, the lindens, oaks, beeches, and ma- 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 7 1 

pies, the dark, towering spruces and taller pines, 
the dusky hemlocks, with their embroidery-like 
foliage, were all ancient friends. Not a bit of rail 
fence, or reach of old wall, or thicket of choke- 
cherry bush but I had scoured for the hundredth 
time, with lynx-eyed scrutiny, for the burrowing- 
places of the sly woodchuck or the loud-chattering 
striped squirrel or chipmonk, as we called them 
in our boyish hunts, along with the cedar-bird, 
whose handsome drab coat, with black and scarlet 
trimmings, was always so attractive to me, or 
about which I had not set up my clumsy, home- 
made box-trap, with its long, slender spindle, 
baited with a "nubbin " of corn, or a sweet apple 
instead ; nor was there a foot of the broad uplands 
over which I had not stalked after plover. Never 
have I found a couch so restful as the mattress of 
springing green under the apple-trees, from their 
days of drifting blossoms, to when their low-reach- 
ing limbs were laden with ruddy, luscious fruit, 
and when the September skies, yellow with golden 
haze, hung their draperies about the woods and 
hills. 

What perfect happiness was held within the too 
short cycle of a year, with its slow-coming and 
slow-retreating days, and that made the sum total 
of Childhood, the Lotus-land of one's lifetime, 
when it was not a dream but a reality to lie prone 
amid the sweet field-blossoms, daintily, gracefully 



72 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

nodding, and giving out their perfume to every 
hoyden breeze, with face turned skyward, the soft 
air ravished and palpitating with the music of 
bobolink, bright-colored oriole, and song-sparrow, 

" The ballad-singers and the troubadours, 
The street-musicians of the heavenly city," 

and, over all, the bright sunshine falling in halt- 
ing, broken shafts of light, down through the dark, 
glossy-leaved tops of the apple-trees, and where, 
looking up, always up, 

" I watch the swallows flying," 

dipping and skimming with swift flight, here and 
there, in search of a pair of singing wings for 
their morning lunch. What happy, happy birds 
they were, and what swift ambitions kept pace 
with their rapid flight with the unuttered wish, 

" Couldst thou tell me which road is best 
Cleaving the high air with thy soft breast 

For keel ? O Swallow, 

Thou must o'erlook 
My seas and know if I mistake ; 
I would not the same harbor make 

Which Yesterday forsook." 

Far, far away are those days, as far away as the 
stars in the sky, and as unattainable ; but what- 
ever I see or hear that recalls boyhood sights 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 73 

and sounds, homely it may be, the vision never 
comes but it stirs to the centre every fibre of my 
inner self, and days and years abate, and I am 
once more the careless youth, forgetful of all but 
the old affection for the fields and woods, and in 
my portfolio of reminiscence are stored many a 
broadly painted picture, such as no canvas ever 
held. 

There is no haste in the eating of this brave 
dinner, but every one takes abundance of time, and, 
after each has eaten to heart's content, the old, 
basket-bottomed chairs are moved back with a hesi- 
tating, doubtful air, bit by bit, as if the occasion had 
not been sufficiently honored in its observance. 
The conversation, so brisk in the earlier part of 
the feast, has lulled into silence. Each seems men- 
tally in a state of preoccupation. The sun pours 
its slanting light through the westward-looking 
windows, and the snow-flakes are still drifting, 
sifting down from the house-roof against the warm 
window-panes. The little clock on its narrow 
shelf between the windows marks the slow-going 
hours with mechanical exactness, and with a never 
varying monotony of speech, unheeding the jeal- 
ous crackle of the open fire, which now looks pale 
and colorless in the bright sunlight that floods the 
home-made rugs and broad fireplace and its dingy 
wainscoting with the glory of its slow-setting 
splendor. The huge fore-stick, laid in the early 



74 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

forenoon, will break apart in a moment, to throw 
its ruddy coals about the tiled hearth. The brand 
has parted. A hasty movement to brush up the 
scattered fire, on the part of some member of the 
family, is the untoward signal that the rites of the 
feast have been concluded ; it is none too soon, for 
chore-time has already come, with its feeding and 
watering of the cattle at the barn, and the getting- 
in of the wood at the house. Mid-afternoon past, 
the winter day closes swiftly. The horizon-line 
of the White Hills, growing more darkly blue, as 
if cast in a mordant of ultramarine, is massed 
against a sky brilliant with color ; its coldly tem- 
pered edges drawn sharply through the west as if 
to cut heaven and earth asunder. 

" The sun, a snow-blown traveller," 

dips slowly and steadily toward the gray sea of 
bare woods, that lengthen out miles on miles to 
the foot-hills of the mountains, their silences broken 
only by the rasping notes of the belated crows, 
the Bedouins of the farm, as they come over the 
hill upon their southward flight. The best wish 
the farmer has for them is that they will not find 
their way back in the spring. 

The next half-hour is a busy one for the house- 
wife, and, while the clatter of the dishes goes on, 
the men-folks are about the chores to get them 
done up quickly. The snow-buntings have already 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 75 

begun their chatter about the door-steps, even 
before the big table-cloth is shaken, as it always 
is, over the snow at their side, the daily feeding- 
ground of these brave little sojourners of our New 
England winter woods. The stormy north winds 
have not the slightest terror for the snow-birds, 
small as they are ; and the deeper the snows, the 
more noisy their frolics among the bare boughs. 

They are the most agreeable out-door compan- 
ions, for, no matter how cheerless the day, — if 
a winter day can be cheerless, and I doubt it, — 
they chatter, chatter overhead and underfoot, tip- 
ping their little heads to one side and the other, 
this way and that, with many a knowing wink, as 
if the winter chopper and themselves were making 
common cause against the inclemency of the 
weather. They are remarkably friendly and in- 
quisitive in their dispositions, and seem to delight 
in having all the woods to themselves, playing 
many a queer prank and antic in their seeming 
desire to entertain their human visitors. They 
are one of Nature's most delightful freaks in this 
land of snow. But the sun has disappeared 

" From sight beneath the smothering bank " 

of western snow-clad hills, now grown dusky in 
the short winter twilight ; the cattle at the barn 
have been watered and fed, while we boys have 



>]6 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

" Piled with care our nightly stack 
Of wood against the chimney-back, — 
The oaken log, green, huge, and thick, 
And on its top, the stout back-stick ; 
The knotty fore-stick laid apart, 
And filled between with curious art 
The ragged brush; then, hovering near, 
We watched the first red blaze appear, 
Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam " 

on quaintly papered wall and whitened ceiling, 
festooned with many a loop of cored apple, hang- 
ing pendent from the drying-poles, held firmly in 
place by iron hooks, driven years ago into the 
splintery hemlock lathing, 

" Until the old, rude-furnished room 
Burst flower-like into rosy bloom," — 

while snowy window-pane and drift-piled ledge 
and dusky sash were resplendent with fire-light 
glow. The little, round-topped light-stand of 
painted pine, with its three short legs, was drawn 
into the middle of the room, and the dented, 
battered brazen candle-sticks, — so old are they, 
— that through the clay ornamented the narrow 
mantel over the fireplace, their tallow-dips care- 
fully snuffed and lighted, were set in place, and a 
brave light we thought them before the advent of 
kerosene. Even after the brilliant burning oils 
found their way to the country-store, farm-folks 
were not averse to the light of the richly endowed 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 77 

pitch-knot ; and, viewed in the light of domestic 
economy, the pine-knot was not to be laughed at, 
for its heat was of the rarest quality, and there 
was ever a big pile of these pasture-gleaned light- 
bearers in one corner of the wood-shed. 

This night, of all the year, the family stayed at 
home. There was no going to the neighbor's for 
an hour's gossip, or to the store for a brief hour 
or two of loafing, and the Thanksgiving dance was 
not then indulged in to any great extent among 
the more respectable portion of the community, in 
the more exclusively farming districts. Beech- 
nuts, butternuts, apples, and cider furnished the 
good cheer, and, what with talk of one sort and 
another, of story-telling, or most-like an innocent 
game of checkers, or of "fox and geese," the 
evening was rapidly passed. 

Old-fashioned as were those days, and primitive 
as were their ways of living, there had been more 
old-fashioned days than they, and days of more 
primitive manners, and all within the memory of 
the grown-up people, who never tired of telling 
how their fathers were wont to hitch the farm- 
horse to the heavy back-stick, and in that way pull 
it into the great kitchen, to be rolled with hand- 
spikes against the back of the fireplace, so tall 
and wide that a horse could stand within it ; when 
there were but two or three roads in town, and the 
proximity of the nearest neighbor was reckoned 



78 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

by miles, two, three, and often more, and the 
school-house, where they had one, was even still 
farther away ; when a flint and steel, a box of 
powdered /?/7//£ or tinder, and a rude hand-bellows, 
were the only means at hand for the building of a 
fire ; when those were lacking, coals were borrowed 
at the nearest house, with which to start the 
hearth-flame anew ; — days that abounded in adven- 
tures of the hunt, oftentimes full of peril ; days of 
rude desire and of rude plenty. 

We children never tired of listening to these 
tales, from one who, like " Uncle Enoch," was so 

" Rich in lore of fields and brooks, 
The ancient teachers never dumb 
Of Nature's unhoused lyceum. 
In moons and tides and weather-wise, 
He read the clouds as prophecies, 
And foul or fair could well divine, 
By many an occult hint, and sign, 
Holding the cunning-warded keys 
To all the wood-craft mysteries ; 
Himself to Nature's heart so near 
That all her voicings in his ear, 
Of beast or bird, had meanings clear, 
Like Apollonius of old, 
"Who knew the tales the sparrows told, 
Or Hermes, who interpreted 
What the sage cranes of Nilus said; 
A simple, guileless, childlike man, 
Content to live where life began; — 
He told how teal and loon he shot, 
And how the eagle's eggs he got, 
The feats on pond and river done, 



AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 79 

The prodigies of rod and gun ; 

Till, warming with the tales he told, 

Forgotten was the outside cold, 

The bitter wind unheeding blew, 

From ripening corn the pigeons flew, 

The partridge drummed i' the wood, the mink 

Went fishing down the river-brink. 

In fields with bean or clover gay, 

The woodchuck, like a hermit gray, 

Peered from the door-way of his cell ; 
The musk-rat plied his mason's trade, 
And tier by tier his mud walls laid; 
And from the shag-bark overhead 

The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell ; " — 

and tell them as often as he would, they were 
ever fresh, and held our rapt attention ; but what 
most we wished to hear was of his "sojerin'" at 
the "Madawaska" war, which in later years I 
learned was a bloodless, inglorious campaign. How 
unfortunate it is that romance ever takes its flight 
along with childhood's tender, trusting, unselfish 
heart. 

But this first day of real winter-weather is done. 
Sated with its homely pleasures, we boys steal 
off to our bed under the rafters, just as the clock 
is striking nine ; and in a few moments, warmly 
wrapped in thick woollen blankets, we are lying 
with our faces to the stars, that look so kindly in 
through the diminutive window-panes in the little 
gabled alcove, that reaches down behind our sleep- 
ing-place to the eaves. A bit of a chat was always 



80 AN OLD-FASHIONED FESTIVAL. 

in order, unless we caught the sound of warning 
rap on the ceiling beneath us, when we bade each 
good-night, and went fast-asleep ; but to-night, 
dozy with so much eating, the usual talk is post- 
poned ; and soon oblivious to all things of an 
outward character, we slumber on into another 
day. 



A WINTER RESORT. 



A WINTER RESORT. 




IKE a soft, wooing "dream of Hafiz," the 
old days come back, and with them many 
a tender memory and charming reminis- 
cence to gild busy Manhood with a larger strength 
and comeliness. One can never tell how much 
or how little of the old life has served as the 
foundation-stones of an after career, but an in- 
spection of the chinks and crannies in the newer 
edifice of human hopes and accomplishments will 
reveal many a forgotten childish hour, the pleas- 
ures of which come back to us unawares, creeping 
up to the threshold of our heart-dwelling, ready to 
come in and entertain us at the first kindly invi- 
tation. What visions come with the closing of 
the eyelids, and what sweet voicings of old-time 
melodies haunt the brooding silence of the night- 
fall, to softly steal away the senses with fair 
dreams, exorcising with a greater than a Merlin's 
magic the carking imps of Care ! How swiftly 
fall away the garments of the years, when Boy- 
hood whispers to one of nestling hillside-acre and 
close-knit orchard, of rustling woodland leafage 

83 



84 A WINTER RESORT. 

and limpid streams, that steal their beauty ever 
from the sky, and pitch their airy trebles to the 
deep bass of soughing pines and rain-dripping 
winds, or to the lighter strains of tripping, odor- 
ous June breezes, blown fresh from the gardens 
of far-off mountains ; of wide-eyed summer sun- 
light and ruddy twilights, palpitating with pip- 
ing notes from the swamps and sweet nocturnes 
from the woodlands ; of topaz-tinted woods with 
their soft reveille of falling nuts ; of bright firelit 
nights that come with gray November days and 
amber sunsets ; of glistening, snowy fields, ca- 
ressed by nipping winds that touch each tip of 
nose and ear with stinging cold, as, beating north- 
ward to the old school-house that held the bleak- 
est spot along the road, we plunged through the 
drifted, unbroken highway with brave, onward 
step, the impetus of which has not yet lost its 
impelling power. O Heart, what a magician 
thou art ! 

The memory of rustic sights and of rustic notes 
makes every man his own poet. We cannot al- 
ways write our heart-songs to the recollection of 
such days, yet the unwritten songs are they that 
fill many a silent hour with a wonderful harmony 
which can be interpreted only by the Soul. The 
heart is a great composer, the singer of scores of 
unwritten melodies, loftier, more grand, and rarer 
than any that have been written. Only God 



A WINTER RESORT. 85 

hears the finer vibrations of its numberless chords, 
its sweetest strains. 

It is Nature that thrills created things with 
the rhythm and poetry of motion, that sits upon 
the lofty hills, clothed with thick woods, and gar- 
nished with singing streams, hidden within the 
shadows of flying clouds and drifting mists, and 
that makes the entrancing music, the magic song, 
that stirs into kindred vibration the heart-strings 
of others. I have never listened to any orchestra 
like that to which Nature trips her measures 
when the robins and bobolinks are making love 
among the orchard-shadows upon the flower-set 
stage of June. No opera has ever had for me a 
tithe of the charm that lingers about many a rec- 
ollection of mischievous frolic behind the old pine- 
desks of the country school-house, of woodland- 
tramp, or pasture-romp of boyhood, with every 
separate day and every flying hour a changing 
scene. 

They who have in their youth and early child- 
hood loved Nature for the simple pleasures she 
ever affords, the woods, the nodding grasses of the 
fields, the bees and flowers, the piping frogs and 
singing birds, are always in funds. Nature has no 
discordant notes, and even the rain-drop has a 
harmonic quality. If one could get the pitch, the 
tone in the deep reverberations, the jarring, the 
rolling, the broken rhythm of the thunder, its 



86 A WINTER RESORT. 

kindred chord in music would not be difficult to 
find. The creaking vines against the windows 
have sweet songs whose minor strains are in rare 
tune with the contraltos of the driving storm- 
winds, but only a lover of these things and their 
kind can catch the beauty of their weird har- 
mony. What wealth has one whose lines have 
been drawn among the " highways and by-ways " 
of Nature. Such an one needs not to go to the 
great art-galleries to be entertained with sights of 
rare pictures mellowed by the centuries, visions 
once so real to the Old Masters, forthe galleries 
of the heart possess the rarer art-treasures, the 
larger fund of real happiness. The arched ceiling 
of St. Peter's has no such frescos as are painted 
upon the roofs of the Soul, roofs as ample and 
wide-reaching as the blue of the summer sky, and 
as boundless as the never-ending circle of the 
horizon. No Old World palace, rich though it 
be with color, and pulsating with the touch of 
hands long since stilled, holds such glowing can- 
vases as hang upon the walls of childish remem- 
brance. The Sistine Madonna cannot compare 
with the motherhood we knew about the old 
hearth-stone. A greater than a Raphael or a 
Rubens has left his treasures in our keeping, and 
Time has no corroding elements that abate their 
freshness. The years but add to their value ; and, 
strange as it may seem, the farther away from the 



A WINTER RESORT. 87 

portal of Childhood we get, the more they are 
multiplied. Not a picture but has its unforgotten 
tale of comedy or romance. No conjurer's trick 
or legerdemain has the secret of surprise like the 
heart's loyalty to home and the old home-influ- 
ences. How these pictures crowd each upon the 
other ! 

From far-off days these glimpses come ; 

As, on the margin of the sea, 
White sails of vessels nearing home 

Rise one by one, and silently 
Creep inward on the lazy tide, 
And, safely moored at last beside 
The black wharves and parapets of the shore, 
Drop their rich treasures at our open door. 

As if some hand the ivory keys 

Of olden times had swept across ; 
Brought back their subtle harmonies 
To emphasize our sense of loss : 
No place, no day so poor to. me, 
But held some trifling history ; 
Some thought of kindly speech, or rarer deed 
Of which our worth or folly stood in need. 

It was the day after Thanksgiving, and the 
fleeting hours were full of notes of boyish prepa- 
ration for the winter school, so soon to open. 
The familiar depository of books and papers, in 
the corner of the ample sitting-room, was thor- 
oughly ransacked for the school-books, some of 
quite ancient imprint, and each well thumbed, 



88 A WINTER RESORT. 

dog-eared leaf of which was marked with some 
special hieroglyphic or way-sign along the then 
seemingly tedious road to knowledge. The arith- 
metic, with its old-fashioned Double Rule of Three 
and brief formulas, was hardly more than a book 
of ancient mathematical puzzles, a scant improve- 
ment upon its immediate predecessor, the old 
" Kinney's " of my grandfather's days, while the 
geography that bore the humble patronymic of 
" Smith," with its thin quarto atlas, was a fit con- 
sort to the old Green's grammar, that had been in 
the family a generation and a half nearly, and 
which, with Pope's Essay on Man, then much in 
vogue as a parsing-book, a Webster's speller, and 
a thin book, bound in green boards, that served as 
a reader, the first I can remember, and which told 
in quaint rhyme, for one of its reading-lessons, 
the story of 

" A white old hen, with yellow legs, 
Who'd laid her master many eggs, 
Which from her nest the boys had taken 
To put in cake or fry with bacon, 
Was roosting in an outer hovel, 
Where barrel, bird-cage, riddle, shovel, 
Tub, piggin, corn-bag, all together, 
Were put, to keep them from the weather," — 

a tale that always possessed a great interest to 
my boyish mind, and which I have not forgotten 
in these later years. This old reading-book com- 



A WINTER RESORT. 89 

pleted the total of school-literature of the house- 
hold, — a barren stock, indeed, but enough, for all 
that, if one may judge by the brawn and brain of 
that generation. 

Next came the writing-books with their neatly 
written copies across the head-line, half-filled with 
numerous blots and scrawls that might well pass 
for cabalistic characters transcribed from some 
Egyptian obelisk ; and at the bottom of all else 
lay the big, thick slate, with its greenish-like, 
mouldy-looking spot in one corner, encased round 
about with a stout birchen frame, sadly hacked 
and whittled during many a purposeless, restless 
moment of school-boy mood, a clumsy, home- 
made frame, that, in spite of many a perilous fall 
upon the worn spruce floor of the school-house, 
and many a battering of swift-flying snow-ball as 
the children went home at night, has preserved 
the homely old slate with never a nick or fracture, 
that is still numbered among the mementos and 
treasures of old times. And now the sight of its 
opaque yet smoothly polished surface will, like a 
wizard's spell, conjure up hosts of episodes and 
familiar faces of by-gone, and with them many a 
long silenced voice, to make the delusion more 
real. The old days look out from its dusky plane, 
and pictures come and go, crowding, jostling one 
against another, . with every minute, developing 
swiftly, as if here were a thousand negatives or 



90 A WINTER RESORT. 

photographic plates in one. Rarest of all is the 
vision of a fair, sweet face, that for years has been 
hidden beneath the nodding blossoms of a far- 
away hill-side, with only the stars and singing- 
birds to keep it company, a memory still fondly 
cherished — of 

" A beautiful and happy girl, 

With step as light as summer air, 
Eyes glad with smiles, and brow of pearl 
Shadowed by many a careless curl 

Of unconfined and flowing hair ; 
A seeming child in everything, 

Save thoughtful brow and ripening charms, 
As Nature wears the smile of Spring 

When sinking into Summer's arms. 
A heart which, like a fine-toned lute, 

With every breath of feeling woke, 
And even when the tongue was mute, 

From eye and lip in music spoke." 

How dear the romance of those days of sunny 
faces and clear skies, at the thought of which 
steal softly back, with swift, unconscious step, 

" Old hopes which long in dust have lain," 

stirring every fibre of the heart. It is in these 
reflective moments, when one rambles into the far- 
off Cathay of the past days, when 

" The shadows melt and fall apart, 
And, smiling through them, round us lies 
The warm light of our morning skies, — 
The Indian summer of the heart ! " — 



A WINTER RESORT. 9 1 

that we know life is worth the living. It is a 
delightful retrospect, this dream-land of the swift- 
flying years, elevating and cheering the loneliest 
hours, a panacea for discomfort and human trial. 
Like an open book upon the table, full of choice 
thoughts and comforting inspirations and rare, 
soothing pleasures, a thousand times read and re- 
read, always new and entertaining, open at any 
leaf we may, our weariness and perplexity melt 
away before such thoughts as the mists before the 
morning sun. 

With these old acquaintances laid out, the field 
is surveyed ; marked out with mental link and 
chain are the boundaries of the intellectual pos- 
sessions to which we hold the title-deeds, as well 
those we hope to acquire in coming days. Who 
has not felt the ambitions of that superlative 
moment when all the world seems to be before ? 
when the grand deeds of others made up the sum 
of one's possessions, rather than the futile, insig- 
nificant rewards of one's own exertions that come 
with a broader experience and more mature years. 
Warm and bright the sunlight of that far-off win- 
ter morning lay upon the gray painted floor of the 
homely sitting-room, strewn here and there with a 
half-dozen of home-made braided rugs, severely 
plain in all its furnishings, and barren of all but 
comfort. Nor had we any sense of poverty then. 
Barren was it ? 



92 A WINTER RESORT. 

No ancient Delft or Cloissonne, 

Or inlaid vase from quaint Japan, 
Above a carved mantel lay ; 

No costly mats from Hindostan, 
Or antique clock, with face o'erwrit 
With mystic symbols requisite, 
Marked slow, beside its dark, wainscoted wall, 
The waning moons, the damp tide's rise and fall. 

No Whittier, rich with soulful rhymes, 

And home-brewed ale of song is here ; 
No sound of Bruges' mellow chimes, 

Or " Wayside Tale," or creaking pier. 
A dozen books piled on their shelf 
Nailed 'neath the dingy clock — itself 
An heirloom with the rest — made up the store 
That bred no wish for other, newer lore. 

But our hearts were warm with the influx of 
youthful dreams, of conquests to be made over the 
tilling of that unknown ground, in the days so 
close at hand, as scant of real helps as the hearth- 
stone blazing before us was of Dutch tiles and 
Flemish iron-work. The immortal Spirit of the 
Fire lived in the cheery blaze of beechen log ; so 
the immortal Fire of Aspiration burned brightly 
upon the hearth-stone of the heart. The outside 
world was a fairy-land, with its great men, its 
great cities, and the ocean with its big ships, but 
tales of all these things had come to us, and made 
rare fuel for our imagination : it was a rude work- 
shop, but rude work-shops oftentimes turn out 
rare work. 



A WINTER RESORT. 93 



II. 



Two days more, and the three months of coun- 
try-school will have begun for the winter. For a 
fortnight past, the traveller over the narrow high- 
way which ran through the then busiest portion 
of the old town, the sleepy hamlet of Spurwink, 
once more familiar to my wandering footsteps than 
in later years, may have noticed a bit of paper, 
oblong in shape, and of scant proportions, tacked 
against the cracked door-panel of faded green 
paint, once bright and fresh, that marked the 
single portal of the low-studded, orchard-girt, brick 
school-house, over the threshold of which, now 
worn thin by a multitude of footsteps, have stormed 
the flying feet of children for two generations, 
whose incomings and outgoings were colored with 
all the romance and vicissitude of childish loves 
and follies, of gratified success and disappointed 
ambition. 

If the traveller had paused to read the faded 
ink, too often diluted, or, rather, stimulated by 
libations from the vinegar cruet, with all its corro- 
sive acidity, — as many a rusty school-pen would 
testify, — written with stiff, cramped hand, and 
now blurred into an illegible scrawl, with the 
drenching it got by the last rain-storm, he might 
have deciphered its legend to this effect : that on 



94 A WINTER RESORT. 

"the Monday following Thanksgiving the Winter 
School" in that district would open, etc.; at the 
end of all which is appended, in a series of extraor- 
dinary flourishes, or, it may be, in a group of 
strange hieroglyphics of microscopic size, the sign- 
manual of that most important in the list of minor 
town-functionaries, the " deestrick agent," whose 
election at the " April meetin' " was the result, I 
may venture to assume, of a great deal of wire- 
pulling ; as if the fate of this bucolic part of the 
municipality depended entirely upon the individual 
who, fortunately or unfortunately, should be put 
in charge of the destinies of the school-going 
youth of its quiet and, to the outside world, in- 
significant burg. 

This school-house was, from my earliest remem- 
brance, on Sunday nights, the scene of a meeting 
of a few yet faithful, of the old-time sort, church- 
going people ; who, at " early candle-light," wended 
their way hither to testify to the faith of their 
fathers, the same faith that sent the Mayflower on 
her New World voyage. In storm or sun, by the 
fading light of still, windless winter sunsets or in 
the face of blustering, snow-laden winds and over 
the badly broken roads, they came ; there were the 
faithful "two or three" present, in whose hearts 
burned a living flame that kept out cold and dis- 
comfort alike ; old-time Puritans in spirit and in 
deed were these, who gathered with each returning 



A WINTER RESORT. 95 

Sabbath twilight to worship among the lurking 
shadows of four bare walls, at no time more than 
dimly outlined in the flickering light of a half- 
dozen candles or "tallow-dips," — oftentimes there 
was only one of these sputtering, uncertain means 
of illumination, —held bolt-upright in greasy tin 
sockets, nailed to the wall ; for only the bits of 
candles, or " dips," unconsumed, were carried home 
at the close of these humble but devout exercises, 
in like manner as they were brought hither, 
wrapped carefully in a bit of stout parcel-paper, for 
economy was religiously taught and practised. By 
ones and twos the people came ; men, women, and 
children in fair proportion, to scatter among the 
huddled desks, and along their pine seats, cold and 
comfortless enough in the winter-chilled atmos- 
phere ; the indefinable sense of shrinking, shiver- 
ing restlessness the more sharply accentuated by 
the slow, discouraged crackle of the fire in the 
huge stove by the inner door, that stands ever 
ajar for the need of a latch. The old one was 
broken in a school-boy scuffle so long ago that the 
event is forgotten. 

The liveliest fire, the whole evening through, but 
partly dispels the inclemency of the season that 
has crept through the chinks and crannies of the 
windows of this rustic cloister during the past 
week ; but physical discomfort has no terrors for 
this group of worshippers, who sit here in the dim 



96 A WINTER RESORT. 

waiting silence until good old Deacon shall 

remind his flock that the " time has arriv' to open 
the meetin'," and then proceed to sound his men- 
tal tuning-fork, and, with cracked, wheezy treble, 
pitch the tone to familiar "Greenville," — a good, 
old-fashioned "penny-rial," — when, at the rather 
untuneful signal, the people would join in, first one 
and then another, singing the hymn : — 

" Far from mortal cares retreating, 
Sordid hopes and vain desires, 
Here our willing footsteps meeting, 
Every heart to heaven aspires," 

every stanza of which was sung. This hymn and 
its old tune were more frequently sung in those 
simple days than now, but why it should be so I 
cannot imagine, for, to my thinking, the old tunes 
have a simplicity and directness, a harmony and 
rhythm of movement, and a grandeur of centuries 
of devotion, that the newer compositions do not 
possess. There is a sublime pathos in the music 
the old Christians sung, and, if I mistake not, 
some of their bravery, their religious spirit, their 
martyrdom has been, like the lingering perfume of 
a long ago plucked flower, their secret charm, a 
sentiment not without its power in these days. 
As the singing-master used to say, "they have 
the wear in 'em." There is nothing in the church- 
music of these times, with their brilliant services, 
that touches the secret springs of the heart like 



A WINTER RESORT. 97 

the old strains, the humble but magnificent melo- 
dies of the early church. I am back again in the 
old seat, where, I am sorry to say, I played many 
a mischievous prank during service, as most boys 
do at some period of their existence, and I hear 
the singers, their deep, mellow bass running 
through the whole like a string upon which are 
strung hosts of tenor, treble, and alto notes, and 
how harmoniously those untrained voices, with all 
their crude strength and rough, robust timbre, 
blended, as each singer beat the time with half- 
uplifted hand or gently nodding head ; and 
scarcely has the last note died away, when some 
brother, with faltering movement, rises to " lead " 
in prayer. 

How plainly comes the vision of the gray-haired 
deacon, never so slow and deliberate as at this 
very moment, less provoking now in his deliber- 
ateness of action than when the farmers drove 
their horses or oxen to his shop to be cunningly 
shod ; his burly form casting its Herculean 
shadow upon wail and ceiling, behind and above 
him, as, standing with a stoop common to men of 
his craft, with dripping candle in one hand and his 
coarse-lettered Testament in the other, he read, 
"I am the way, the truth, and the Life," and with 
what simple dignity the inspired words fell from 
his tremulous lips, as if his assurance of a well 
earned victory was doubly sure. But was there 



98 A WINTER RESORT. 

ever a slower-moulded man than he ? Then came 
exhortation and experience from one and another, 
with long " spells " of silent waiting between, 
with the frequent reminder from this Nestor of 
the parish, "the time is passin', brethren." It was 
with patience I waited on this particular occasion, 
with my old speller tightly buttoned under my 
home-made jacket, ready at the breaking-up of 
the meeting to thrust it slyly into the chosen 
desk in the back row, which I had determined to 
preempt against the earliest comer on the morn 
ing of the morrow, should I fail to be that one 
myself, for to-morrow, before eight o'clock, every 
big boy in the district will be here, and the usual 
pandemonium will prevail, as is common to the 
opening morning Of the winter school, when 
every boy, by hook or crook, attempts to locate 
himself in his chosen place for the session. 

The meeting closes, as all meetings do, at last, 
and, doubtful of my legal rights in this particular 
case, I dodge into the deep shadow of some desk, 
and, with breathless anxiety, await the slow de- 
parture of the older people and the boys and girls, 
whose careless scrutiny I have escaped. The 
lock snaps in the outer door, and, after a few 
moments more of waiting, in the deep silence of 
which every heart-beat of my own is plainly audi- 
ble, I slip the stick that fastens the lower sash of 
one of the two rear windows from its place, and, 



A WINTER RESORT. 99 

breaking it, leap from the outer sill into the snow, 
well pleased with the strategy that will give me en- 
trance to the old school-room with the early dawn. 
The sleepless night well over, I have strapped 
my school-books to the old slate, with the little 
Testament atop of all, with luncheon stuffed into 
the pockets of my overcoat, and am well down the 
pine-sheltered road, on my way to this Mecca of 
my winter pilgrimage. 

How still the winter morning ! Not a breath of 
wind, not a sound except the crunching of my 
thick cowhide boots over the beaten, frosty track 
of the snowy highway with every buoyant step. 
The paling light brightens slowly : — 

" The circle of ether, deep, ruddy, and vast, 

Scarce glimmers with one of the train that were there, 
And the leader, the day-star, the brightest and last, 
Twinkles faintly and fades in that desert of air." 

So night has blown her lamps out, one by one, and 
the sky is growing more luminous in the east, 
multiplying streak upon streak of crimson, flush- 
ing the horizon with carmine glory, with not a 
cloud to be seen, and, — 

" The waning moon, all pale and dim," — 

just sinking out of sight behind distant Chocorua's 
glistening horn. With what cold, sharp outlines 
these northward-reaching monarchs of the hills 
are piled, one against the other, like mountain 



IOO A WINTER RESORT. 

masses of blued steel ! A few moments later, 
how brilliantly they come out against the gray 
west, as they catch the first glimpse of the sun ! 
The farm-houses along the way are still held in 
drowsy slumber, with not a single curling chim- 
ney-smoke in sight, and it is too early yet to 
hear 

" The cock's shrill clarion." 

How silent this Kingdom of the Frost ! What 
bitter, stinging cold creeps through the porch-way 
of the mouth and nostrils into the chambers of 
the lungs, quickening the sluggish blood into 
tumultuous activity ! What hidden storage-bat- 
teries of electricity are these that strain each 
nerve in the body into an aching tension, with an 
exhilaration almost akin to the upbearing flight 
of a bird ! 

It is a dazzling scene this morning landscape 
makes, with every sagging rail and slanting perch 
for the summer birds in the road-side fence, and 
every leafless twig and wide-flung limb and 
scraggy bush, thickly encased in a chilled armor 
of hoar-frost, that, when the sun is up, glint and 
glisten with vivid splendor. 

" Look ! the massy trunks 
Are encased in pure crystal ; each light spray, 
Nodding and tinkling in the breath of heaven, 
Is studded thick with trembling water-drops, 
That glimmer with an amethystine light." 



A WINTER RESORT. IOI 

Rarely blest is the Soul that draws its window- 
curtains aside to look upon such rare morning 
vision where Nature is supreme. The seeing of 
such sunrise splendor makes thought swift- 
winged ; and as the 

" Wizard of the Merrimac 
So old ancestral legends say — 
Could call green leaf and blossom back 
To frosted stem and spray," 

I see within each scintillant wayside jewel, not 
only pictures of, 

" Piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air," 

and sleety storm, with hordes of driving snow- 
flakes sifting down the sleepy hollows of the past- 
ures and through the moaning woods, and over 
the bare meadows, drifting full, and hiding the 
narrow brooks under many an archway of strange, 
fantastic shape, with boisterous, blustering breath 
and freaks of careless cunning, but glimpses of 
radiant Summer, with her blushing fields wet with 
fragrant dew, and lightly veiled in warm-cheeked 
mists that wait the ecstatic hour when 

" the young archer, Morn, shall break 
His arrows on the mountain-pines, 
And, golden-sandalled, walk the lake," — 

driving them before. I see her vast cathedral of 
high noon, with dome of overarching blue, where 



102 A WINTER RESORT. 

" White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep, 
Light mists, whose soft embraces keep 
The sunshine on the hills asleep," 

await the high-mass of the swift-shod winds and 
rain and pealing thunder. How different the 
silence of this morning-hour from the hot, pulsat- 
ing stillness, the drowsy languor of a summer- 
noon ; or when out of the falling twilight, broad- 
orbed, and yellow like virgin gold, 

" The moon, slow rounding into sight, 

On the hushed inland sea looks down." 

This is the silence of Death unto the Resurrec- 
tion of a new Life, while the silences of Summer 
are the quiet slumberings of a tired child ; but if 
this is Death, with what beautiful, shining counte- 
nance he walks the breadth of his dominions! 

My feet have kept pace with my thoughts, and 
over the crest of the hill, village-ward, a lone 
chimney sends up an isolated column of blue 
smoke, a warning sign from one of the village- 
roofs that some one is astir. Its betrayal of 
some early riser sends me across-lots, over the 
tumbling stone wall, into the corn-stubble, half- 
buried in snow, of a neighboring field, down 
through the alders and drooping birches of the 
swamp that flank the wide-stretching woods, and 
out through the narrow rim of the orchard, the 
gnarly, ragged limbs of which, with many a 



A WINTER RESORT. 103 

creaking caress, touch the black roof of the old 
school-house. A moment more, and a stout, 
rifted fire-stick from the dilapidated wood-house 
has been placed against the school-house wall, 
beneath the window. With a stout push and lift, 
the lower sash is up, and, scrambling over the 
narrow sill, I am master of the situation, with 
leisure to select the choicest seat, which was, all 
things considered, the one in the " back row " that 
flanked the boys' side of the middle aisle. 

It was a severely plain room, and in those days 
I thought it large, with windows on its sides and 
one end, affording an abundance of light from the 
east, south, and west. A half-dozen tiers of seats, 
and two-thirds as many rows, with a trio of nar- 
row, sharply slanting aisles between, running out, 
or rather downward, to the open floor, comprised 
the larger part of the interior. In the open space, 
a huge, cast-iron stove, with bulging sides and 
cracked top, is perched, none too solidly, upon 
three rickety, crooked iron legs of its own, and 
for the other leg a single brick stood on end ; its 
score of rusty funnel-joints were wired high up the 
ceiling, that, with many a sharp angle, hugs the 
incline of its steep pitch-roof above. This stove, 
with its brick hearth, took up a deal of room, 
as every reciting class realized, with its homely 
body ruddy with its roaring fire. In the right-hand 
corner, by the single entrance to the school-room, 



104 A WINTER RESORT. 

the door to which was minus its two lower panels 
and otherwise in a dilapidated condition, was the 
somewhat imposing desk of the teacher, with its 
imitation mahogany graining, its dusky color be- 
ing in marked contrast to the cold iron-gray 
of the more humble desks and wainscoting about 
the room. It is a short step, however, from these 
plebeian ranks of gray-painted pine-seats to the 
consulship of this bucolic empire, as I myself 
realized, as, sitting in this self-same mahogany- 
colored desk a few years later, I looked outward 
to the upturned, questioning urchin-faces, not as 
a culprit in disgrace, but as one of the royal line 
of Pedagogues who had lent their labor and their 
fame to make this domicile of learning illustrious 
among its local kindred, as it really was. It was, 
however, with an entirely different sensation that 
I met the mute, inquiring gaze of my former 
mates, but now subjects, in which was concen- 
trated the essence of friendly interest and curious 
speculation, from that pervading my heart on 
this bright winter morning when my prospective 
labors and enforced study-hours excited only 
pleasurable anticipations, when Care was no more 
a reality than the most improbable of Grecian 
myths, and when Ambition, instead of Necessity, 
drove on the " box." 

From this roughly battered door, the long 
Dunce's seat ran across the end of the room, and 



A WINTER RESORT. I05 

above it was the old black-board, with dusty face, 
white like a miller's hat, cut and scratched with 
many a queerly carven hieroglyphic, and sadly 
warped, its dents and cracks filled with pulverized 
whiteness. In one corner of this once ebony-hued 
bit of rustic school-furniture is a chalk picture of 
a house, with volumes of imaginary smoke coming 
out of its chimney, a legendary rooster, and family 
pig, all drawn in the uncertain perspective of 
childhood. A pig is as much an adjunct of this 
type of art as it is a part and parcel of the Pen- 
ates of some households, where the pigs and chil- 
dren sleep together. Simplicity is a quality native 
to the rustic heart, if nowhere else. 

Turning the sharp angle of the adjacent corner 
of the room, this famous seat, hated by the little 
lads and lasses as sincerely as were the pillory 
and stocks by their Colonial ancestors, runs from 
thence under the shadowy sill of a westward, 
looking window to meet the descending row of 
desks that flank the inner wall. The severe lines 
and angular architecture of this interior had little 
of attractiveness, but the rather bespoke the 
sturdy, virile quality of rustic civilization at the 
beginning of the present century. 

It was the work of only a few moments to kin- 
dle a fire, and the blue smoke from the low 
chimney was a swift signal for the gathering of 
the clans. A short half-hour later and every 



Io6 A WINTER RESORT. 

youngster within the radius of a long, hilly mile 
had stormed over the threshold, slippery with in- 
trodden snow. The last tardy comer found his 
choice of a seat like Hobson's choice of a horse, — 
that or none ; but there was always more or less 
of swapping and dickering among the boys, in 
such matters, and, before the teacher came in 
sight over the village knoll, by a dint of coaxing 
and lively barter, many an exchange of seat had 
taken place, and a buzz of satisfaction had settled 
over this heterogeneous community. 

The young man who is to teach the school this 
winter is a college student, and a stranger to the 
people in the district. A month ago, we knew 
his name, since when Dame Gossip has been busy 
settling his pedigree to the satisfaction of the 
greater part of the community, and what was 
lacking in actual knowledge has been supplied by 
a lively conjecture. The verdict is a favorable 
one, and the young fellow is started on the wave 
to popularity already. What antics were cut up 
in this brief hour of waiting, of jumping the 
broom-stick down the aisle, of kicking at a chalk 
mark on the wall, or of crossing the room hand 
over hand along the brown hemlock beam over- 
head, all in a bedlam of noise that only forty 
throats can make in combined vociferation. Out 
in the long entry, some of the larger boys pitch 
old-fashioned copper cents at a square of numerals 



A WINTER RESORT. I07 

chalked out upon the dirty spruce floor, and, may- 
hap tired with that sort of exercise, climb the 
narrow scuttle upon an exploring expedition into 
the attic. With what envious hearts the small 
boys watched these burly fellows disappear, one 
by one, into the dark shadows of this, to them, 
unknown, mysterious region ! What wonderful 
pictures of horses and cattle one boy used to draw 
upon the black-board, to the great amusement of 
the girls and small boys, who crowded about as he 
worked with a broken bit of chalk ! But it is nine 
o'clock by the "brummagem" bull's-eye watch of 
one of the scholars. 

" Here comes the teacher ! " 

" Here he comes ! " 

" That's him ! " 

These and kindred exclamations, from nearly 
every voice in the room, make the gamut of ex- 
pression, and what a queer jumble of sound it is ! 
A bevy of little girls, with hearts as warm and 
big as themselves, run down the road to offer a 
childish welcome. 

"Good-morning, teacher!" the girls say, in 
concert, and half his apprehension has disap- 
peared at this omen of good-fortune, but it is 
with strangely quivering nerve that this college 
stripling turns from the narrow track of the snowy 
highway toward the school-house door. The pan- 
demonium of the last half-hour is stilled. The 



108 A WINTER RESORT. 

scholars are in their seats as the master enters ; 
then all rise together, standing silent, demure, 
and curious, to make, a moment later, their awk- 
ward bows, — a good old custom then in vogue, 
that included in its courtesy the school committee, 
much as were dreaded the calls, periodically made, 
by those dignitaries. 

" Good-morning, teacher ! " 

" Good-morning ! " is the half-audible reply ; 
and, removing his hat and coat, the school-work is 
begun. Every eye watches the teacher intently 
as, with quick, nervous movement, he takes up the 
well worn Testament. 

" We will read the first chapter of St. Matthew's 
Gospel. The boy in the corner will read the first 
verse." 

The reading begins in a strained, timorous way, 
but in a few minutes the voices settle down to 
their natural tone. Half the scholars have left 
their Testaments at home, as a matter of course, 
and read over the shoulder of their boyish neigh- 
bor, or remain silent. What a queer mixture ! 
Deep bass, gruff as a burr-saw, or rich with clear, 
musical note ; contraltos, clear as crystal, and 
bell-toned sopranos mingling with shrill, childish 
treble ; for there are not a few excellent voices 
here, as a visit to the winter singing-school would 
show. In this reading not a line is exempt. Scholar 
after scholar wrestles with these strange Biblical 



A WINTER RESORT. IO9 

names, the best pronunciation of which is but a 
sort of lingual twist, a contortion articulate of 
sound ; but, nothing daunted, the mass of Hebrew 
genealogy is gone through, and the closing line 
read. The upper corner of the leaf is turned 
down, and the Testaments are put away until the 
next morning. It is an anxious ordeal, ending in 
a spell of awkward silence ; the interim that hangs 
ever upon the heels of an initiatory step, but one 
that is soon ended in this case. The mutual sur- 
vey by brown desk and gray is over. With a lead- 
pencil and sheet of paper, the teacher goes up one 
side of the aisle, and down the other, — the girls' 
side first, — taking the names and ages of each 
scholar ; and then the classes are called, the 
largest first. Each boy and girl is interrogated 
as to his or her progress at the close of the pre- 
ceding term, and by the time this preliminary 
work is accomplished, the little bell tinkles the 
signal for the girls' recess, and out they go, with- 
out order or priority, with hasty step on the part 
of the little ones, and with more dignity and grace 
on tic part of the older misses, of whom there are 
many. What a subdued buzz is going on out in 
the entry ! The jury is out, the master thinks. 
What would he give to hear the discussion going 
on behind those thin pine panels, as he catches a 
merry peal of laughter, clear and musical, and full 
of good-nature rather than derision. The bell rings 



IIO A WINTER RESORT. 

again, and one by one they file in, in their neat, 
linsey-woolsey gowns of drab, indigo, and acorn 
color, their home-made shoes of stout calfskin, 
tanned soft almost as glove-leather, making a not 
over-sharp staccato along the white floor, as they 
take their seats. The teacher reads the ver- 
dict written upon the pleasant, interested faces, 
and takes courage. With the girls on his side, 
there is no fear of failure. The boys have gone 
out, and are less noisy than might have been 
expected. Some of the smaller boys come in, and 
stand about the stove, warming themselves, some 
of whom, with an outcropping spirit of mischief, 
have brought in tiny balls of snow, to drop them 
one by one on the stove until the hiss and sput- 
ter have attracted the teacher's attention ; with 
big round eyes they watch the teacher as he 
assists one of the larger girls at her example. He 
is under a severer fire than before, but he is easy 
and clear in his explanation, and ready in the per- 
formance of this most difficult example in the 
arithmetic, putting to shame the thought, and 
mantling with burning blushes the fair cheek, of 
his pupil, who had sought to put his knowledge 
to the test ; but her embarrassment goes unno- 
ticed, and the fair-haired girl thanks him from the 
bottom of her heart, and vows unquestioning alle- 
giance from this moment. The boys are all in 
without the ringing of the bell, which augurs well 



A WINTER RESORT. Ill 

for the new master. Hardly is he in the floor by 
his desk, and a stalwart arm is up. It is the last 
danger-signal. This time it is a puzzle in Double 
Proportion that is to be unravelled, and it is done 
successfully ; but it does not stop here. Retalia- 
tion is in order, and the first class in arithmetic is 
called into the floor. The fellow who began at 
Double Proportion is asked to put upon the black- 
board an example, and therewith explain the 
method of finding the Least Common Multiple ; 
which, after a waste of chalk, and a greater waste 
of time, he admits himself unable to do, while the 
fair-haired girl does herself credit in the perform- 
ance of the task allotted to her. The merited 
chagrin of the one is as noticeable as the pleased 
elation of the other. The examination of the 
teacher has ended without comment ; but the 
supplementary school committee has earned a 
place on the Dunce's seat, which the generosity 
and diplomacy of the master does not allow him 
to occupy. The remedy is a severe one, but is 
administered with wholesome effect. The teacher 
turns interviewer with a vengeance. The scholars 
who wanted to begin where they " left off last 
term," and go right ahead, are set back two-score 
pages or more, and the review work begins. The 
young men and women are docile enough, glad to 
be rid of a test that might bring ignominious 
failure, These preliminaries over, and the first 



112 A WINTER RESORT. 

outcropping of boyish mischief nipped in the bud 
with a firm hand, the master is supreme. His 
new subjects respect him already. 

The winter noon comes quickly, and the tin- 
pails, filled to their respective brims with dough- 
nuts and cheese, mince-pie, and withal a big 
greening apple, with smooth, glossy skin, and 
single bruised spot, where it fell from ripened 
twig to the rocks in the old wall, or yellow russet, 
with rough, tough rind, its pulp solid as ever an 
apple could be, with its acidulous crystals close- 
knit together, for dessert, are brought out from 
the mysterious recesses of these cavernous desks, 
and, amid the rattling of their metal covers, — a 
homely music enough, with its broken rhythm and 
a constant clatter of tongues, — the luncheons dis- 
appear, and the hour speeds swiftly away. What 
acrobatic feats follow the putting-up of these din- 
ner-pails ! What boyish squabbles and wrestlings, 
and rubbing of faces with the freezing snow, by 
victor and vanquished, took place out-of-doors, be- 
tween the athletes of this rustic university ! and 
what jumpings — square-footed, hop, skip, and a 
jump, and leap-frog — and battles with flying 
snow-balls made up its entertainment ! But the 
most laughable of all these antics was the " French 
wrestle," where the boys, with arms and legs 
interlocked, rolled up and down the narrow 
floor, backward and forward, in the rude trial 



A WINTER RESORT. II3 

of their strength. How bright those halcyon 
moments were, within the warmth and glow of 
this noisy room, the 

" Squares of sunshine on the floor " 

not a bit brighter than the faces of these hoyden 
children ! But all this changed in a twinkling ; 
where a moment before was boisterous mirth is 
now only the occasional clang of a falling slate 
and the buzz of busy lips whispering their lessons 
to themselves, and the sing-song of the reading- 
classes as, each in turn, they file out into the 
front seats. So the day goes, and, soon over, 
the sunset flashes its ruddy light through the 
western window-panes, flooding the room with a 
warm, mellow splendor, as the long spelling-class 
is called out, the last to recite, the last word in 
the long list is spelled ; the master rings his bell, 
and, with a startling whoop, the children storm 
over the outer threshold, and hasten homeward 
to tell their mother what a fine teacher they 
have. 

So go the days, as the winter weaves its frosty 
rime deeper and deeper, until the first winds of 
March blow the snow into more fantastic shapes, 
filling the country roads with impassable drifts, 
hiding the fences and walls out of sight, when the 
school is over for the winter, and the work at 



114 A WINTER RESORT. 

the huge wood-pile, back of the long wood-shed, is 
begun. The books are packed snugly away, in 
their accustomed corner in the old cupboard, 
where it is not improbable that they will remain 
untouched for another year. The school-days 
soon grow unreal in the hard work of the farm, 
and fade away into the far land of dreams. 

III. 

Occasionally, in later years, I find myself fol- 
lowing the trend of the old highway, down over 
the hill, through the shadow and bloom of the or- 
chard-trees along their boundary of mossy stone 
wall ; down through the village, with its less than 
a score of quiet-like white houses and homely 
thrift, to turn sharply around one of its four cor- 
ners, where, spiritless and almost deserted, sits 
the old grocery-store, the scene of many a boyish 
prank, with its sagging ridge-pole and shattered 
chimney-top, its windows curtained with cobwebs 
finer than the rarest of filmy Madras ; its narrow 
panes, ancient and greenish-hued, and brown with 
a generation of dust, and etched with many a 
downward streak of melting winter frost or sum- 
mer rain, the insignia of a ripe old age, to go a 
bit farther on, to stand at last upon the roughly 
quarried steps of this Alma Mater of earlier boy- 
hood days, to feel again 



A WINTER RESORT. 115 

" the gleams and glooms that dart 

Across the school-boy's brain ; 
The song and silence in the heart 
That in part are prophecies, and in part 

Are longings wild and vain." 

To pass this low portal, once so familiar, is to 
breathe again the buoyant airs of far-away days. 
How cramped and shorn of their once rude com- 
forts these old scarred desks ! how short and 
steep the incline of these three worn pathways 
between ! The years are swept away before the 
rushing torrent of my thought, and it is with half- 
expectant look I search for some familiar face, 
but fruitlessly, — the faces are all new and un- 
familiar. The same roughly plastered walls, dingy 
and smoke-stained, the same worn desks of pine 
are here, marred with many a flinty pencil-mark 
and coarsely cut initial, some of them quaint, 
touching memorials of those whose hill-side dwell- 
ings have door-ways of stone or marble, but 

" There are things of which I may not speak ; 

There are dreams that cannot die ; 
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, 
And bring a pallor to the cheek 

And a mist before the eye." 

The heart-throbs quicken under the potent spell 
of these homely surroundings. Sitting in the old- 
time seat again, the olden desk before me, — the 
title to which has passed from one generation to 



Il6 A WINTER RESORT. 

another so frequently by the mere act of abandon- 
ment, a simple enough conveyance, — I count 
across its sloping top ink-stains and knife-marks, 
a score or more, and which I readily translate 
into many a story of stirring episode and boyish 
adventure. 

This notch, midway the smoothly rounded edge, 
marked the boundary line of my possessions, and 
on the hither side of which I did my mental plough- 
ing and sowing. These clumsily carven figures 
mark the date of an unmerited chastisement at 
the hand of a master whose courage and manli- 
ness were ever at a low ebb in the school-room, 
whatever may have been their quality elsewhere. 
I see him now as then, tall and closely knit, with 
stooping shoulders, sombre-browed, with dusky, 
slumberous eyes, the depths of which glow with 
pent-up, angry passion, his teeth tightly shut as if 
battling with his ill concealed choler ; his whole 
air that of distrust, as he leans with his elbow 
athwart the broad moulding of his desk, face to 
face with his school, feared and detested by boy 
and girl alike. I can never forget him, for, like 
Banquo's ghost, Memory will not down at the 
bidding. I feel the coarse strand of cotton twine 
tighten about my fingers as my mate deftly takes 
the " cat's-cradle " from them — fingers younger and 
smaller than his own by almost ten years — with 
an unfortunate movement that betrays his sport. 



A WINTER RESORT. II7 

What swift vengeance followed its betrayal ! He, 
a strapping fellow of twenty, went unscathed, 
while the stripling boy was made a scapegoat of 
another's mischievous folly. A clenched fist is 
raining blows upon my head and shoulders, that 
send the lesser culprit staggering blindly down 
the aisle. Oh, the cowardice of that assault! — 
an insult never forgiven, never forgotten ! 

Many a soft, decayed apple, thrown with unerr- 
ing aim by some daring and discourteous young- 
ster, left its dripping stain upon the broadcloth 
coat of this teacher, for whom none had a sincere 
regard, when his back, more welcome than his 
scowling face, afforded a good target ; the culmi- 
nation of all which was a pitched battle with a 
plucky insurbordinate, a barely won victory for 
the master, and a demoralized school, which, for 
the remainder of the term, like the " brood of the 
Dragon," paid more attention to mischief than to 
any legitimate study. 

Many a time, sitting here in the waning light of 
the winter afternoon, I have waited impatiently 
for the closing of the school, only that I might 
hurry home to a plain supper of hominy and milk, 
a hearty but homely repast, and to the doing of 
the chores about the house, the most important 
of which was the bringing-in the wood for the 
night, the rifted sticks of beech, maple, and oak, 
with a big basket of fat pitch-knots, the whole skil- 



Il8 A WINTER RESORT. 

fully stacked against the massive jamb of the wide- 
mouthed fireplace, to hasten back, in the swift- 
gathering darkness, to the school-house, from every 
window of which shone the flickering " light of 
other days," the spindling tallow "dip " — a really 
brilliant illumination from the highway. We boys 
used to carry each a " dip," or candle, on these 
occasions, and it did not matter for candlesticks 
as we had a very simple method of fastening it to 
the desk, by first lighting our wick, then dripping 
hot tallow upon the desk-top, and then plant- 
ing the butt of the candle in the melted mass 
before it had time to cool. Sometimes we carried 
a small block of wood in which had been bored a 
hole with the " maple-tree auger," a simple enough 
contrivance, though possessing somewhat an air of 
pretentiousness, for those boys who brought can- 
dlesticks were accused of putting on airs without 
hesitation. Every scholar in the " Spurwink Dis- 
trict "is here, and there are, as well, large acces- 
sions from the adjoining districts. It is the first 
" spellin'-school " for the winter. What an ani- 
mated picture, this conglomerate of humanity, for 
here are old and young crowding about the stove, 
the aisles and seats, in busily talking groups, a 
modern Babel in a mild form. Hearty guffaws 
and ringing peals of laughter greet the scintillant 
falchion of the village wit, or follow swiftly the 
perpetration of some practical joke upon the dul- 



A WINTER RESORT. II9 

lard bumpkin of the neighborhood. What a glow 
of summer sunshine reflects from these faces, half 
in shadow and half in light, a combination of ani- 
mate movement and chiaroscuro that would de- 
light the heart of a Rembrandt. It is a strongly 
Rembrandtesque scene, with its flaring, sputtering 
candles, its feeble lights and sombre effects ; but 
they were famous nights, bubbling to the brim 
with merriment, ill concealed pride, or witless fail- 
ure as the varied performance in these orthoepic 
contests afforded. 

The sharp staccato of the ferule upon the 
teacher's desk is the signal for silence, a silence 
that for a moment is only disturbed by the brisk 
crackling of the fire in the stove, or the rattling of 
the loose sash as the gusty winds go scouring 
past, thick with drifting snow. The sound sends 
a chill down the spine, and a weird, uncanny moan 
it is, dying away into the faintest whisper, to slowly 
return to the shrill pitch of a moment before in a 
series of crescendos and diminuendos, fascinating 
both ear and sense in the singular beauty of its 
tone and rhythm. These nocturnes of the night- 
winds in midwinter touch the heart with a won- 
derful power, tuning up the slackened chords and 
giving them stronger impulses, larger scope and 
expression. Nature always pitches the tone, 
whatever the heart-song may be. The -noisy 
flame goes roaring up the long, rusty funnel in its 



120 A WINTER RESORT. 

haste to catch up with the wind, peeping out here 
and there, on its journey, through the cracks in 
the sagging joints, its eyes bloodshot with re- 
pressed anger. What romance of the breezy hills 
and leafy woodlands is here ! what songs of far- 
flown birds, and hints of sky and scudding cloud- 
shadow, that, like countless harmonics, make a 
grand score of summer song, to swell with tumul- 
tuous flood through the heart, out of this simple 
note of crackling flame ! 

The teacher has trimmed the smoky wick to his 
candle, cutting it off with his sharp-bladed knife 
against his desk as one would the fuzzy end of a 
string. The leaders of the respective sides draw 
lots for the first choice from this heterogeneous 
assemblage of differing ages, sex, and talent, tak- 
ing their places, each side opposite the other, at 
the head of each outer aisle, and, one by one, as 
they are called, the best spellers array themselves 
down the aisles, face to face, and so the alternate 
choice goes on, the poorer spellers chosen last, a 
process much after the fashion of sorting pota- 
toes, — in which quality, rather than size, is 
sought for, — until the ranks are full, or until the 
floor fails to accommodate the lengthening line. 
The teacher gives out the words from Webster's 
Speller, those of one and two syllables at first, to 
be followed later on by those longer and more 
difficult with their various combinations of silent 



A WINTER RESORT. 121 

letter and troublesome diphthong. This is the 
preliminary skirmish. Each is on the alert to see 
how his neighbor fares, and with what swift, per- 
fect enunciation the words come, flying to right 
and left, like so many bullets, only to be caught 
and sent back with equal celerity. — With never a 
miss ? Oh no ! for some of them are returned as 
misshapen as if they were real bullets, flattened 
and dented with the force of their blow. 

" Tally ! — a mark, score," says the master. 

" T-a-1-l-e-y," is the blundering response. 

Down sits the biggest, oldest boy in the school, 
in the midst of a silence that is worse than a 
round of loud-mouthed jeers, to have a small boy 
opposite spell the word correctly, and to see, a 
moment later, the best speller in his aisle cross 
over to the other side as a forfeit for his igno- 
rance, or, at best, heedless mishap. So the sport 
goes on, until but two or three are left upon their 
feet, to wrestle with such heterographic puzzles 
as abound in English orthography. What laugh- 
able episodes occur in swift succession in this rus- 
tic comedy ! — a " Comedy of Errors," indeed, that 
is not ended until the single remaining actor on 
this narrow stage stops the play from sheer weari- 
ness, to be congratulated by his acquaintance as 
the champion orthoepist of the occasion. But the 
best part of the "spellin'-match " is to come with 
the blowing-out of the candles, when matches of 



122 A WINTER RESORT. 

an entirely different sort are in order ; where 
Emulation fools with the keen shafts in Cupid's 
quiver, and the only trophies are sightless scars, 
that hurt none the less because they are hidden 
from sight. The "going home with the girls" is 
rare entertainment, but it takes a deal of courage 
and gallantry to " make love," with the atmos- 
phere at twenty below zero, with the wind, that 
cuts the cheek like a lash, leaping field, fence, and 
highway in a boisterous sort of a way, that makes 
one's skirts and tippet-ends snap like a whip-cord, 
and sends the whirling snow along the narrow 
highway in blinding clouds. It was enjoyable, all 
the same, but more so on becalmed winter nights, 
with the sky studded with starry splendor, with 
smoothly trodden roads, over which we coast 
half the way homeward. Love never looks at 
the thermometer at such times. His garments 
are impervious to wet : and, insensible to cold, he 
walks or rides happy in his own conceit. The 
barometers that men consult in forecasting fair or 
foul weather, and that hang, most like, upon the 
lintel of the old porch-door, tell idle tales to lov- 
ers. A weathercock of doubtful happenings wins 
more appealing glances from these dabsters in the 
Ovidian game, where all the cards are hearts, 
where hearts are trumps, and where "deuces" 
take the " game," or " knaves " get oftentimes the 
largest share. 



A WINTER RESORT. 1 23 

It is a delightful change, when to step out of 
the impoverished air of the school-room into the 
silent winter moonlight, the crisp, singing snow, 
and frosty, nipping weather, with all the landscape 
sparkling with crystallized cold, is to have every 
nerve set a-tingling with a shock from these sub- 
tle batteries of Nature that follow in the track of 
the bleak winds of the Northland ; when every 
indrawn breath is pregnant with a peculiarly 
pleasing sense of exhilaration, and when every 
footstep steals new vigor from the snowy path- 
way. One feels at such a time as if he could 
make the journey of the world, so active are these 
forces of Infinity, claiming kinship with Life. 
The rare beauty of such a glorious night-tide, 
flooded with the brilliance of the "full-orbed" 
goddess flashing from the stiffened sprays of the 
road-side weeds and sprawling alder-bushes ; from 
feathery hackmatack and gray birch, huge clus- 
ters of emeralds, — the snow beneath one's feet 
a very bed of jewels, and every suspiration a sip 
of vitalized nectar, — is, beyond compare, one of 
the richest, most intoxicating delights to which 
the most exacting lover of Nature may aspire. 
The higher thoughts and lessons in life that are 
stored away in the differing phases of Nature, as 
she reveals them, one after another, in the visions 
of beauties that lie far outside the domain of 
articulate expression, her summer and winter 



124 A WINTER RESORT. 

pictures throbbing with life, are never uncovered 
to some people, knit as they are into the very- 
fibre of human existence. How strong the warp 
and woof of the skies, the green earth, the sobbing 
rains, and bare, tossing branches of the trees, 
the slow-falling snow-flakes throwing their crys- 
tal coverlets over the hills, and the bright, health- 
giving sunshine, and how sustaining their influ- 
ences in the varied needs of humanity ! I have 
heard of an affliction called color-blindness : I 
think there is such a thing as beauty-blindness. I 
pity those people who are afflicted with the latter. 
To them, on such a night as this, the rounding 
glory of the moon is no more than a huge kero- 
sene lantern hung in the sky to light them 
through the sleepy valleys or over the stony 
hills, wherever the crooked country highways 
may take them. It is more a source of material 
profit than of inspiration. It is, as well, an excel- 
lent aid to them on summer nights, when the long 
days are hardly long enough for the haymaker, 
who steals his thrift from Sleep. These swirling 
waves of bracing oxygen, doubly rarefied in the 
laboratories of the sky, laden with frosty pellicles, 
are suggestive of bodily discomfort, of frost-bitten 
ears and noses, and the thousand and one freaks 
of which poor mischievous Jack Frost is guilty. 
To me they sing sweet songs of the upper world, 
charming the Soul into willing silence ; else they 



A WINTER RESORT. 1 25 

play a weird, stirring music that sets each strand 
of this wonderful web of breathing, speaking, lis- 
tening animation, the human body, to dancing 
Irish jigs and hornpipes. What a juggler with 
the senses is this Spirit of the Winter ! 

This old school-house was the scene of many 
a frolic and heart-burning. It was here that the 
singing-school came on Friday nights. And what 
a strange medley of sound broke over the single 
hemlock girder, that spanned the centre of the 
room, after the singing-master had chalked a staff 
across the face of the big black-board, filling the 
broad spaces between with big white dots for 
notes, until the gamut was complete, as, with his 
violin, he pitched the tone of C natural, with the 

direction, " Sing ! Do o," when every voice 

essayed the dolorous task, making the very violin- 
strings shiver among the broken shafts of tone 
that went flying about the room, and no two 
together ! Rap-rap goes the fiddle-bow on the 
back of its much-to-be-pitied companion, — " Once 
more! Do — o." "Do-0-0 — o," it comes in undu- 
lating waves, with something more of harmony 
than before ; and the master, with sharp staccato 
accent, in which lingers a suspicion of disgust, 
says, " Better ! " There are some old singers here, 
but the majority are beginners, some of whom have 
no more idea of a tone and no more musical sense 
than a stick of wood, and what wooden work they 



126 A WINTER RESORT. 

make of it ! After an exhaustive explanation of the 
staff, its importance in one way and another, the 
scale is exemplified and rewritten, and then comes 
the singing, " do, re, mi," until its top is reached ; 
when we go back over the way we came in a 
series of halting tones, as if each note were a 
rung in an imaginary ladder. There was many a 
long breath of satisfaction, as one after another 
got back to the starting-place ; as if it was really 
a perilous descent, made with many a quavering 
and rest. 

I always felt, after such an evening, that the 
master earned his stipend ; but whether some of 
these would-be songsters got the worth of their 
money was a debatable question. Twelve lessons 
made up the quarter, that was soon over, and quite 
a respectable singing-class was turned out as a 
result. The last night of all, after the recess was 
over, the Lord of Misrule held sway, and the 
" doings " and " goings-on " of young and old 
made the night a memorable one in the district 
annals. The debating . club made up the trio of 
these homely entertainments, and many a burst 
of rustic eloquence has rolled and surged about 
these narrow walls in the discussion of such mo- 
mentous questions as attracted the attention of 
thinking people in those clays. These dusty gray 
walls, like those of many another old school-house, 
are pregnant with abundant and pleasing reminis- 



A WINTER RESORT. 1 27 

cence, and speak as with living voices, telling- the 
homely story over and over again of childhood's 
happy hours. 

" Strange to me now are the forms I meet 
When I visit the dear old town : 
But the native air is pure and sweet, 
And the trees that o'ershadow each well known street, 
As they balance up and down, 
Are singing the beautiful song, 
Are singing and whispering still " 

the old-time greetings, and many a clearly limned 
sketch, the counterpart of long ago, is here to 
arouse its recollections : — 

" A school-boy, with his kite 
Gleaming in a sky of light 

And an eager upward look : 
Steeds pursued through lane and field; 
Fowlers with their snares concealed, 
And an angler by a brook," — 

a-weaving out of the new the old, old spell. The 
old road is here ; so is the big bowlder under the 
mongrel apple-tree by the pasture-bars ; the old 
knoll is here, but the ancient well-sweep has fallen 
among the hard -hack bushes, whose dry, dun- 
colored plumes, laden with snow in winter, cover 
it with tender compassion. The red and yellow 
painted farm-houses, along the village road, look 
as weather-worn as. they did thirty years ago ; and 
the rails in the roadside fences are only a little 



128 A WINTER RESORT. 

more deeply frescoed with yellowish green lichens ; 
the fringe of birch-bushes has been cut away, but 
the highway seems very narrow for all that, hardly 
wider than the narrowest street in my metro- 
politan home. In the village, the old-time houses 
are here ; only one is missing, the oldest land- 
mark of them all. How I miss the old house ! 
It is a Rip Van Winkle sort of a place — a Sleepy 
Hollow, rather ; where the echo of the outside 
world, and its busy schemes, rarely come to dis- 
turb, and where a new house is as much of an 
event, and as full of local anticipation and interest, 
as a long expected meteor, the coming of which 
sets whole nations agog with curious discussion. 

There is hardly ever any change, outside its 
personality, in the rustic belongings of an essen- 
tially farming community. The boys come up in 
the old-fashioned mental-training way, with the 
same characteristics as their fathers had before 
them ; sturdy, self-reliant, and unconventional in 
the naturalness with which they carry their man 
and womanhood, to go to the college, the busy 
commercial centres, and to the workshops of the 
great corporations. Rarely do they return to the 
old homestead and the old hill-sides, unless to find 
a big, out-door breathing-space, and a few days of 
genuine, restful quiet ; or a tramp in the mead- 
ows, or among the lowland shadows that hide the 
lurking-places of the red-spotted trout ; or a few 



A WINTER RESORT. 1 29 

days among the covers of the shy partridge, car- 
peted with the brownest and shiniest of pine- 
needles. 

The census-taker compares one decade with 
another with but little satisfaction. There is 
neither increase nor decrease in this rustic popula- 
tion. The impoverished farms, handed down from 
father to son, with their ancient brown roofs, lie 
asleep among the hazy hills ; and the faces, every 
one not less familiar, peering from window and 
door-way, greet his coming with the half-curious 
interest and familiarity that old acquaintance ever 
asserts. It is always safe to inquire after the 
young people at the city, for they are not all here. 
Life would be less real were no,t this transplanting 
process a continual one ; for it is an ebb-tide that 
washes against the feet of these wooded hills, 
carrying on its outward flow the stanchest and 
bravest of their youth, and bringing nothing in 
return. The depletion is constant. The number 
of scholars in a given district does not vary from 
year to year, and a crowded country school-house 
is a rarity. The old seats easily accommodate the 
incoming generation. New feet may walk the 
narrow deck of this training-ship, but there is 
ample room for the drill ; for, no sooner do the 
young sailors become experts in the use of mental 
cutlass and pike than they depart for the conflict. 
The metropolis takes the stoutest-hearted and 



I30 A WINTER RESORT. 

most ambitions of the country lads, and where the 
lads go the lassies follow. Every advanced school 
is a recruiting-station for the stalwart worker in 
the broader career of metropolitan life ; for 
the woodland-shadowed valleys and rugged, sun- 
browned hill-slopes of New England are the nur- 
series of the highest type of humanity ; and it is 
a mighty race of men and women whose first 
indrawn breath was the perfumed summer breeze, 
or the snow-laden winds of winter, mayhap tem- 
pered by the ruddy glow of the big-mouthed 
fireplace ; and whose swathing-bands were of 
home-made woollen, prickly with cockle-burrs from 
the farm-garden ; whose first bed was the homely 
heirloom of unpainted pine, which had rocked a 
half a dozen of their progenitors within its flaring 
arms and clumsy wooden hood, lulled into soft 
slumber by the old timepiece that has for long 
years sung a ceaseless monody of 

" Forever, never ; never, forever," 

against its rudely timbered walls. I never go to 
this Sleepy Hollow among the hills, but I visit 
this Mecca of many a boyish pilgrimage ; this old 
brick school-house of the country-side, with its 
memories of homely, truthful ways and simple 
living, but I feel the stronger and better for the 
thoughts it always inspires, and there comes with 



A WINTER RESORT. 131 

it the tender consideration that is akin to true 
filial affection. Every heart has its Mecca. This 
is mine ; and I am a devout worshipper at its 
homely shrine. 



RUNNING WATER. 




RUNNING WATER. 

LMOST every farm has its adjacent wood- 
lot, its pasture woodland, and somewhere 
within its leafy recesses is hidden its 
green-girt, tree-shadowed watering-place, where, 
in the hot summer days, the cattle go to drink, 
and to stand knee-deep in the cooling stream. It 
is the focus of all the woodland ways. If one is 
much accustomed to wandering in strange woods, 
he will most likely find himself following some 
one of these sinuous trails made by the cattle, 
and how abundant in charming surprises they are ! 
A country road is one thing, but a cattle-path is 
quite another. Along the white line of the high- 
way, one is rarely out of sight of brown-roofed 
homesteads, snugly ensconced amid their rugged 
orchard-trees, or at least within sight of their red 
chimney-tops. He is rarely beyond the sugges- 
tions of the fence-builder and road-maker. Man is 
well enough in his place, but one sometimes finds 
the solitude of the woods as delightful as associa- 
tion with his own .species. One is hardly satisfied 
if he is not harnessed to something of work or pur- 

i3S 



136 RUNNING WATER. 

suit ; but when the harness chafes, it is irksome 
to bear. I do not wonder that men like to get 
away from their own kind and to forget that there 
are other people in the world ; and, once within 
the domain of the road-makers of the pasture- 
woods, the harness drops from one as he would lay 
down a burden, and life is begun anew. 

Out in the world " all roads lead to Rome," so 
some one has said, but here all roads lead to the 
shady covert of the ever-bubbling spring. One 
sits in his house, and, by the light of his kerosene 
lamp, reads of what others have seen as they have 
journeyed up and down through the world, with- 
out a tithe of the pleasure that a visual experi- 
ence would have brought, while another is reading 
for himself the stories Nature has written, in 
coarser lines, but with vastly more power and 
intelligence, in a neighboring field. It does peo- 
ple a deal of good to gad a bit on their own ac- 
count, but it is better to gad with one's self for 
company, or, at most, with some one whose soul 
is not less perfectly tuned to out-door sight and 
sound than your own. As Mr. Burroughs says, 
one " may sit by his fireside and make wonderful 
voyages ; " so one may sit in his narrow door-way, 
and watch the procession of the round year, but 
there is no zest in such entertainment. The con- 
vict in his cell, the single window of which looks 
out upon the earth, may do the same, but it gives 



RUNNING WATER. 137 

him no taste of the vigorous strength and fulness 
of being that might be his, were he able, like 
others, to go and come at will along Nature's 
highways. One gets tired of constant looking. 
There is a desire to feel an object as to see it. 
It is one thing to watch the snow-buntings pick- 
ing the crumbs from the snow, where they have 
been dropped by the housewife in her shaking of 
the table-cloth, and another to have these self- 
same birds eat from your hand. One likes to feel 
that he is a part of the great flood of natural life 
that is ever surging against his door-step. There 
is a sense of exhilaration in the mere feeling of 
the blowing winds. I hold up my hands, and the 
winds go between my wide-spread fingers like the 
moist threads from a great reel that is being 
swiftly unwound. It is sensation, the expression 
of a fact in Nature. One's knowledge of a bee is 
wonderfully expanded after he has trifled with its 
weapon of offence. A taste of wild turnip, which 
you will find almost anywhere in the woods, will 
furnish food for several moments of deep thought, 
and you will realize what a superfluous amount of 
" chain-lightning " can be done up in very small 
and innocent-looking bundles by Nature. In ac- 
quiring out-door information, all the senses must 
be on the alert, and, in some sense, trained to 
their work. Do you wish to know how cold it is 
where your thermometer hangs on the outer 



138 RUNNING WATER. 

sash of your window ? If you do, don't satisfy 
yourself with a glance from within at the instru- 
ment, but step outside into the nipping air, take a 
half a dozen deep breaths, take a bite of the clean, 
wind-driven snow into your mouth, the taste of 
winter itself, and your fire will look outward to 
you with a more cheerful greeting upon your re- 
turn into the house. The thermometer speaks a 
dead language. Its translations are mere arbi- 
trary signs ; but the North winds talk in a native 
dialect : their speech is that of the mother-tongue. 
People make a great mistake in their shrinking 
from a hand-shake with Nature. She grips hard, 
oftentimes, but it is the mother holding to her 
child. 

Rain is wet ; but if you wish to know it as the 
corn-leaves do, stand out amid the falling drops 
and let them teach you the fact. I have seen, in a 
certain well written essay on farm-life, that one of 
its occupations was the " shaving " of " hemlock 
shingles." I never heard of a hemlock shingle 
until I read that essay, and I doubt if its writer 
ever saw one. Of all tree-things that grow in the 
woods the hemlock is the poorest in the quality of 
its building material. It is excellent for rough 
boarding, and for framing timber, for joists and 
sills and rafters, but the old houses are built of 
pine. It is only in these days of impoverished 
forests that the hemlock has a marketable value. 



RUNNING WATER. 139 

Its bark is worth more to the tanner than its 
shaky butt-log is to the lumberman. Did you 
ever drive a six-penny nail into a hemlock board 
near its end ? Try it once, and see if its coarse 
fibre does not pull apart and leave an unsightly 
split along its rough length. The sun warps it 
into ungainly shape, and the rain completes its 
ruin. A hemlock shingle would not stand a sin- 
gle summer month of heat and wet. Spruce and 
fir have been made into shingles, but they are not 
much better. Cedar and pine, free of sap, make 
the roof-coverings that grow old with the century. 
Men learn these things by experience, by working 
with their keen axes in the midwinter snows, and 
beside the growling saws in the mills, and upon 
the roofs of houses, and by living under them, 
for that matter. 

One who takes everything for granted and who 
never makes any explorations for himself, whose 
thoughts fit like a tongue into a groove that some 
other person has made for him, finds himself stuck 
fast with every change in the weather. Open 
eyes and open ears pave the way to knowledge, 
and place one upon the best of terms with Nature. 
One likes to live upon good terms with his neigh- 
bor ; but until he finds out for hima«lf what his 
neighbor is of kindliness and thrift, his respect 
for him is without foundation. In either case, a 
thorough acquaintance is the first condition. 



I40 RUNNING WATER. 

There are some kinds of acquaintance that come 
with gadding that are hardly profitable, but Nature 
is the mother of a gadding race, and to know her 
gadders best, for their fellowship is a rich one, her 
fields and woods are to be scoured by day and by 
night, through every day in the year. Nature is 
the ideal of the picturesque ; nor is she unthrifty, 
for she makes ample provision for all her children, 
for mental and bodily entertainment alike. When 
the world was new, people lived out-of-doors more 
than in these latter days, and the influences of 
such living gave man a larger frame and tendinous 
quality. The rude Roman became the conqueror 
of the world, and in a later century the Gauls 
swept down from their northern fastnesses to over- 
throw the Franks in turn. Then came the chil- 
dren of mighty Thor upon their voyage of conquest ; 
but, when Civilization came, these rude children of 
Nature were overthrown, not because they were 
deficient in strength and bravery, but because 
Civilization put new weapons into the hands of 
her warriors, weapons borrowed from Nature her- 
self. 

The same instinct leads men to-day away from 
the beaten paths into ways trodden only by ani- 
mate nature, and untrodden by the masses of men. 
The wigwam is still the ideal of a lover of out- 
door life. Thoreau's cabin in Concord woods was 
the next thing to it, and the record of the simple 



RUNNING WATER. 141 

thought it afforded and its beautiful surroundings 
has made it a charmed spot. The red man, breath- 
ing the aroma of the pine-boughs, and with it 
their health and healing, paddling along his 
streams of silver in summer, and in midwinter 
tramping over his snowy fields on his home-made 
shoes of hoop-bent ash with the net-work of inter- 
woven green-hide cut from the skin of some fleet- 
footed deer, drinking at every breath the sinew- 
strengthening wine of his northern winds, was a 
true child of Nature. His manly stature and his 
dusky comeliness were God-given. What a free- 
dom was his, and what a contrast between this 
aboriginal man and the flower of society-civiliza- 
tion of to-day ! A man longs for the sight of this 
child of the woods, for something that stands for 
strength and native freshness, for tense sinew and 
supple movement, at the appearance of the dude. 
There is something in the heart of man that re- 
volts at the presence of one of these limp speci- 
mens of humankind, and from which one is apt to 
turn away with ill-concealed pity. 

Why do men persist in relying upon their tailor 
for the impression they hope to make upon their 
surrounding fellows ! I wonder if these young 
men who hide their necks within a hoop of laun- 
dered linen, that touches their chins, ever thought 
of the neck as. the shaft that God made for the 
capstone of the head ! There is grace and power 



142 RUNNING WATER. 

in the neck of a man, as there is a rare beauty in 
the neck of a woman. Why should men deform 
themselves at the expense of the strong lines and 
sturdy physique that are their glory ? I have heard 
of men's wearing corsets, and I have thought it a 
pity the Almighty could not remodel them into 
women, only that the women might object, and 
justly too, to any such additions to their sex. I 
apprehend that if God' was satisfied with Adam, 
he would not recognize in this later production 
much that was in the Omnipotent mind when the 
first tenant was created for the Garden of Eden. 
The Indian, in his leather buskins and untaught 
grace, would be the more creditable companion. 
Artificiality is the bane of living to-day. A dug- 
out is better than a palace. Nature is a better 
mother than Fashion. Boulevards and profes- 
sionally laid-out parks and gardens, with their 
smooth driveways and parterres of hot-house 
flowers, find scant place in a heart that has tasted 
the delights of moss-covered rocks, whose up- 
holstery is softer than the pile of velvet, that 
knows well the woodland's 

" secret places 
And the nests in hedge and tree," — 

that has learned the rhythmic legends of the brooks 
in the meadows, and that has rested awhile beside 
their droswy pools, aflame with the glowing tints 



RUNNING WATER. 143 

of October's royal foliage, each liquid-filled cup a 
palette strewn with sun-made pigments. Such 
turns away from the human imitation as from an 
empty feasting-board. It is a matter of regret 
that the Rococo style of exaggeration finds so many 
admirers among people of whom we have a right to 
expect better intelligence and better things. Why 
not do as artists do with their brushes ? Why not 
take Nature for a teacher ? " Painting is Nature 
seen through the prism of an emotion," and we 
are largely creatures of our emotions ; if we do 
not use the brush, we can use our thought to pref- 
ace speech and example. Put all sham behind. 
Insist on quality. Paste is one thing, but the real 
diamond is quite another when you wish to pur- 
chase. Oh, for the hidden depths of the stalwart 
woodlands, where the grosser self is lost in the 
spirituality of Nature, away from the beaten roads 
of humanity to the haunts of the thrush and 
clownish cat-bird, where are hosts of acquaintance, 
of whose presence and speech I never tire ! 

Among the woods of New England which pos- 
sess the most pleasing character are the Coniferce, 
the pines, spruces, and firs, that stand out so 
warmly beautiful and suggestive in the winter 
landscape, and so coolly inviting on a hot summer 
afternoon. One sees much to attract and inter- 
est at every step along the cow-paths and indis- 
tinct woodland-trails which intersect each other 



144 RUNNING WATER. 

at short intervals, no matter what direction he 
may take. Through the broad acres that made 
up the old homestead-farm, there ran, lengthwise, 
a high ridge, which overlooked the surrounding 
country for miles. On one side the fields slope 
regularly down to the lowlands, losing themselves 
across the white barrier of the ancient highway, 
in the scrubby ferns and dwarf thorns of the clear- 
ing always known, since I can remember, as the 
" home-pasture," whose inner margin was bounded 
by a thick, dark belt of these self-same pines, 
while just beyond lay the meadow, within its 
fringe of hackmatack and bitter alder. On the 
other side of this natural dome of farming-land, the 
slope is not less easy and gentle to the black line 
of Conifera, which, like the rim of a shapely cup, 
beautifully irregular, its old-gold lining peeping out 
here and there, holds within its charmed circle a 
crescent of yellow sands, and a wide reach of in- 
land pond, burnished with the brightest of sun- 
light into the semblance of liquid silver. 

Let me take you to an old watering-place, a 
perennial spring in the woods, that was a very 
familiar spot to me in my younger days. Let the 
pasture-bars drop, one by one. Do you hear the 
sharp echo of their clanging notes come back 
from the rim of the woodland ? I hear the vibra- 
tions of those dropping barriers of sun-dried pine, 
even at this distance of time and space ; " sounds 



RUNNING WATER. 145 

from home " they are in truth. It was an ever- 
wonderful outlook from the farm hill-top, lofty, 
breezy, and in every sense invigorating ; and not 
less delightful was the plunge down its easy slopes, 
out of the scorching glow of the midsummer sun, 
into the refreshing shadows of the sapling-pines. 
From this gateway in the old wall that hems in 
the pasture-lands, it is but a short distance over 
the blueberry or the checkerberry knolls and 
through the grassy streets frequented by the cows, 
that with many a twist and turn take one betwixt 
the clumps of white-flowering thorn that fill the 
air with delicate perfume, to the dwarf pines and 
hemlocks that make the skirmish-line of the 
deeper forest. Down a bit, along the edge of this 
jutting cape of woodland is an arched opening, 
and opposite, a few rods to the right, is a crease 
or sagging fold in the face of the pasture, where 
the grass shows a streak of lighter green, as if 
earth were more lavish of her fertility here than 
elsewhere. This streak of extravagant color is 
the silent betrayer of a water-vein, that gushes 
out among the rocks lower down the swale 
through the spring months, but that disappears 
with the coming of July's drying heats. It is not 
a favorite watering-place with the cattle. Its out- 
let is broad and marshy, and its stream is lost in 
a bed of oozy, black muck, from whence, in times 
gone by, have been taken many an ox-load of de- 



146 RUNNING WATER. 

cayed vegetable matter to the compost-heaps of 
the uplands. The cattle like better the running 
stream yonder in the depths of the woods. Once 
fairly within this Gothic archway of the June 
woods, how delightful the change into the soft- 
falling shadows ! The woods are palpitating with 
music. Do you hear the xylophone-player rap- 
ping out his tune upon that hollow maple-stub, 
just beyond that dark-green curtain of black hem- 
locks ? It is the morning solo of the Hylatomus 
Pileatus, the largest and handsomest of the New 
England Woodpecker family. How. sharply fly 
the notes through the air ! First a few notes, as 
if he were marking time, and then the long, stir- 
ring roll that wakes the drowsy woods into a con- 
fusion of echoes. Then a deep silence for a 
moment. The fellow, in his greenish black coat, 
may have discovered our intrusion. If he has, we 
shall not see him, for he is exceeding shy. I 
hardly dare breathe, much more move my feet, 
for fear a crackling twig may betray us. But we 
are still unseen, for there is a sound as of the 
tearing and stripping-off of bark and wood, and 
in a moment more there comes a measured tap, 
— one, two, three, in even succession, then more 
stripping of bark, and I know that we are as 
yet undiscovered. How stealthily we creep over 
the mossy floor under the hemlocks ! Ah, there 
he is, clinging gracefully, but with the grip of an 



RUNNING WATER. 1 47 

athlete, to the tall dead maple, from the topmost 
limbs of which I have shot many a gray squirrel 
aforetime. His back is toward us, and I watch 
him chiselling with powerful thrust into this stout- 
ribbed tree, with stroke after stroke of his sharp, 
black bill. What a busy search he is making 
after borers and other vermin that hide within the 
barks of these decaying trees ! How firmly he 
holds to the slippery, grayish wood, where it has 
been denuded of its covering ! A moment more 
of silence and he sounds a few measured beats, 
and then follows a rattling drum-call. What swift 
strokes, made with a rapidity beyond the pretence 
of mental counting ! He throws back his head 
and utters a single bird-call, and there is a sound 
of some swiftly moving body through the air, a 
galloping of wings, and his mate has joined him. 
She is the smaller of the two. They seem to hold 
a consultation, and then, creeping warily to the 
rear side of the maple-stub, off they go with a 
funny-sounding cackle. It is a queer, dry note, 
but one to be long remembered. The log-cock, or 
pileatus, is an all-the-year-round resident of the 
Maine woods, and, although I have seen him and 
his mate on the trees, along the huge, moss-cov- 
ered logs that lie so thickly about in the " second- 
growths," the relics of the pioneers in these 
woods, and darting through the woodland shad- 
ows like a flying missile, in summer and in winter, 



148 RUNNING WATER. 

I have never discovered his nesting-place. He is 
the Prince of Woodpeckers, in all his barbaric 
strength and beauty. It is worth a long wait in 
the woods to see this one bird. But the hemlocks 
about us look as if they had been tattooed. A 
bit up from the base of each tree, on its south- 
ern side especially, are parallel rows of small per- 
forations through the bark, about the size of a pea 
and hardly two inches apart. This is the work of 
the Downy Woodpecker, the smallest of the spe- 
cies. Each hole is a trace of their search after 
the larvae and eggs deposited by the millions of 
summer insects that fill their part in animate 
nature. He does not exhibit the shyness of the 
Hylatomus, and I have many a time crept to 
within a few feet of the little fellow as he was 
busy at his breakfast. The Downy Woodpecker 
is a handsome fellow, indeed, in his coat with its 
broad, white stripe down its back seam, with its 
black sleeves splashed with round white spots, 
his white necktie, and with a dash of scarlet on 
the collar behind. 

During the fall months you will see this Wood- 
pecker at work in the orchards, boring one hole 
after another with his gimlet of a bill, making a 
circle around the limb or tree-trunk, until the bark 
looks as if a charge of buck-shot had been fired 
into it, and as though every shot had struck by 
rule. This fellow is a treasure to the orchardist. 



RUNNING WATER. 1 49 

He does not work about the trees in sap-time, but 
it is really when he does them the least harm. 
Those who have paid most attention to the habits 
of the downy woodpecker assert that, were it not 
for the Picidce, the orchard trees would be over- 
run with vermin ; and it has been noticed that 
the trees most visited by them are the most 
rugged in their growth, and, as well, the most 
prolific bearers. This bird plays its part to per- 
fection in the economics of Nature, for it is a 
veritable scavenger among tree-vermin. I doubt 
not but the birds satisfy all claims for farm 
damages committed by them, by reason of the 
police duty they are constantly performing. Why 
growl at their taking a homely recompense to 
themselves. Hang up your shot-guns, boys ; the 
birds of all kinds have a sufficiently hard time of 
it, even if you let them well alone. Let the 
woodpecker inspect the apple-trees as much as he 
will ; your apple-bins will need an extra board to 
hold the hoard of the orchard. 

In front of the farm-house was a row of butternut- 
trees ; and above these, flanking the door-yard fence 
were three mulberry-trees, and within the door- 
yard area close by was a stately elm overtopping 
them all. One of the mulberry tops was quite 
dead, and for years I remember its upward pointing 
branches stripped of their bark, as straight and 
sharply tapering in their slender lengths, and as 



150 RUNNING WATER. 

rain and sleet-scoured in their polished whiteness, 
as a stack of lances. This was one of the drilling- 
grounds of the woodpecker tribe. From one end 
of the day to the other, some one member of this 
numerous family was in sight ; and the acrobatic 
performances along the upright limbs and. trunks 
of these trees were something marvellous to my 
boyish eyes. This fence ran down the slope of 
the yard to the highway, the barrier to which, on 
the field side, was an old tumble-down wall, and 
along its ragged top was laid a line of topping- 
poles, dead pines cut in the woods where the 
trees stood so thickly that these particular trees 
died from suffocation ; these poles were laid along 
this rambling barrier of cobble-stones to tone up 
things a bit by way of completeness, and as well 
to keep the wayside cattle from jumping from the 
poor man's pasture, the country road, into the 
more tempting and richly endowed fields beyond. 
Here were a half a dozen apple-trees arow, as 
scraggy, homely, and full of character as apple- 
trees usually are, and that ran down its length to 
the boundary line of the adjoining farm. It was 
the constant habit of the woodpeckers to strike 
the tree farthest down the line in their flight up 
from the woods, as they began their morning tour 
of inspection around the farm, galloping from tree 
to tree, for their flight is more like a gallop than 
anything else. 



RUNNING WATER. 151 

From topmost limb to base of trunk goes the 
woodpecker in his busy searching-out of the floss- 
wound cocoons and hidden deposits of insect larvae. 
I have watched by the whole hour to see them go 
round and round the stalwart trunk of one tree 
after another ; tearing off a bit of bark here, a bit 
there, boring here a hole and there a hole, with a 
sure instinct that a sweet morsel would crown 
their labors a moment later. What a lively fellow 
in his coat of half-mourning, relieved by a spot or 
two of scarlet ! Did you ever note the action of 
this winged gadder as he puts his ear up to the 
rough garb of a tree, as if he were locating his 
prey? That is precisely what he is doing. He 
is locating a nest of ants, or the tunnelled home of 
a borer, by sound. See him draw his little head 
back, until the tips of his tail-feathers are thrown 
against the rind of the tree below, where his feet 
grip into its fibre ; and then, how swiftly he rains 
the telling blows into the bark, like those of a 
maul upon a chisel. The bark is soft, and you do 
not hear his rat-tat-tat, rat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, 
so distinctly as you will when he gets to the dead 
mulberry; but the chips fly, and you know how 
earnestly he is engaged in the pursuit of his prey, 
to let you get so near him that you can see the 
roguish wink he gives you from time to time, as 
much as to say, — " I see you, little boy, but don't 
bother me. I've-struck-it, I've-struck-it, rich-rich- 



152 RUNNING WATER. 

rich. Don't-you-see, don't-you-see, rich-rich-rich- 
rich-rich-rich-rich ? " and so he pounds and chisels 
his way into the decayed wood with his sharp bill, 
until his head is out of sight almost. All at once 
the pounding stops. There is a deep silence. 
The woodpecker's head is motionless, and pushed 
as far into the aperture he has made as he can get 
it, and with his long, barbed tongue he is pulling 
out a big white worm. How daintily he wipes his 
mouth upon a rarer than damask napkin, a bit of 
gray lichen, after his luncheon ; and then he is off 
to the next tree in the row, where he repeats his 
first performance with equal grace and vigor. These 
little fellows work with surprising rapidity and an 
unflagging industry. There is a marvellous buoy- 
ancy in every movement, and a cute knowingness 
that lends a rare charm to their action, whether 
alight or awing. Their flight from one tree to an- 
other is a sort of rollicking gambolling in air ; and 
there is a tinge of grim humor in the way they have 
of knocking for admittance at the door of the poor 
worm that is to be served upon their breakfast- 
table. If the worm could think audibly, no doubt 
he would call the woodpecker a Ku Klux of the 
most outrageous type, a most desperate and de- 
structive character, a router and a murderer. 
Some people have no idea that there is such a 
thing as a just retribution, or that justice, sooner 
or later, requires a full recompense of misdoers ; 



RUNNING WATER. 



1 53 



nevertheless, wickedness rarely goes unpunished. 
If it is not punished by the open visitation of 
the penalty, there is an ever present sense, 
call it what you may, — conscience or what 
not, — of debasement and moral impoverishment, 
that saps manhood of its larger, better strength 
and courage. But the butternuts and the dead 
mulberry-tree were always the ones last visited ; 
and what a rattling of swift notes at this mu- 
sicale among the white polished lances of their 
bare limbs ! 

Oftentimes three or four of these dry-wood 
musicians are playing at " taps " at the same mo- 
ment among these low-limbed trees, and with the 
chirping of the sparrows, the whistling of the ori- 
ole, and the vocal sparring of robin and bob-o'- 
link, and the humming of the bees in the brown 
hives adjacent to the garden clover-blossoms, 
their xylophone accompaniment is in wonderfully 
good taste and brilliantly executed. Unlike the 
red-head, the downy woodpecker does not invade 
the cornfield, or the fruits in the garden, but 
serves rather as an aide-de-camp to the farm- 
hands, who go around among the trees with mop- 
brushes and dilutions of soap, lime-water, and 
other home-made vermin-exterminators. Our fa- 
vorite is not gifted with song, but he is a musician 
of no mean merit ; and his sharp, staccato notes 
are ever welcome and pregnant with meaning. 



154 RUNNING WATER. 

His company is certainly worth his maintenance 
about the farm. 

But let us return from our chase after the 
downy woodpecker, to the winding paths that the 
cattle make in the woods, brown with the leaves 
of last autumn and thickly carpeted with petioles, 
— " chives " the country-folks call them, — from 
the hemlocks overhead. It is a lazy pace the 
cows take over and through these sylvan high- 
ways, but how finely the accumulations of twigs 
and drifting leaves have been ground under the 
tread of their clean hoofs ! On either side of 
these pathways are thickly matted beds of par- 
tridge-berry, with their scarlet fruit, and on the 
knolls are clusters of the bunch-berry, of a shade 
lighter scarlet with ochreous tint, and all about 
are the slender, spindling stems of the. ground-nut, 
with tiny white petals thrown wide-open, inviting 
us to dig down through the soft leaf-mould to its 
globular-shaped root, that, when eaten, leaves in 
the mouth a sweet, aromatic taste. Here are 
beautiful, gracefully nodding anemones by scores, 
delicately veined lady's-slippers, and an occasional 
lady's-smock, to lend their colors to the figured 
carpetings. How indolently our feet carry us 
over these narrow cattle-trails ! How much there 
is to see ! In one of the hollows the ground is 
still moist, and here we discover the fresh track 
of the cows as they have come from their break- 



RUNNING WATER. I 55 

fast in the pasture. The marks of their feet are 
perfectly outlined in the fine black loam. But 
leaving the shadows of the hemlocks, we are in 
the deeps of the birches. Here are tender sap- 
ling-birches, gray birches, with their white barks 
that look as if Nature never had a washing-day, 
dirty and unkempt, with hosts of dead twigs cling- 
ing to their trunks, and spotted with countless 
specks and black pimples, bending and reeling 
even now under the aching backs that the snows 
of last winter gave them. Here are yellow birches 
and the canoe-birch, and occasionally a fine speci- 
men of the white birch with all its interlacing of 
delicate drooping limb ;■• and beyond a huge 
beech-tree, that one man cannot half encircle 
with his arms, is the single wild apple-bearer of 
these woods, an aristocrat among its forest breth- 
ren, with its clean, tall body and long, slender 
arms reaching skyward. If you should ask the 
owner of the farm what sort of an apple it bore, 
he would tell you, " natural fruit," at once ; but 
press him a little farther, he would say, " They're 
'long-stems,' hard as a rock of emerald in the 
fall, but yellow and juicy as one would wish in 
June." So they are, for I have carried many a 
one to the summer-school in my tin pail. Do you 
note again its slender body, and long, shapely 
limbs, each one as neat and trim as that of an 
elm ? I well remember the stems to these apples, 



156 RUNNING WATER. 

for they were not less than three inches in length 
at their best : and their flavor was what one 
might expect, tempered with the sunlight and 
shadow of the woods. These birches are the 
best of game-cover for miles around, with their 
thick carpetings of leaves and intricate interweav- 
ings of foliage and moist runs that indicate water- 
veins just below their surface. It is in these 
depressions in the floors of the woods that one 
finds the most delicate and beautiful of the moss 
family, hiding here and there the rough granite 
bowlders beneath their drapery of softest green 
and black velvet plush, that the looms of men will 
never know. 

One sees hosts of birds in this month of June. 
Every tree has its pair of songsters, for this is the 
nest-building month of the year. The birds are in 
their best voice, and their plumage is most brill- 
iant. The birds in the woods are legion. I was 
informed not long since, upon good authority, 
that in a single county in a neighboring State 
over ten thousand birds were butchered in a 
single season for their skins : a butchery that was 
carried on to satisfy not only a despicable greed, 
but to gratify a vanity that for thoughtlessness 
and downright cruelty has no equal. It is some- 
thing for which people should answer to the 
Almighty, if they are to account for any human 
weakness. How any woman can bedeck herself 



RUNNING WATER. 157 

in the garb of such God-given blessings as the 
singing-birds are, and at the expense of such 
indiscriminate slaughter of the most divinely 
voiced and beautiful things in animate Nature, 
is beyond any conception of my own. Fashion is 
no excuse. It is simple brutality. I cannot qual- 
ify my detestation of a characteristic so blunted in 
its love for the beautiful and in tender feeling 
as well. How a woman, who would be quick to 
exhibit compassion in other things, who loves the 
fragrant flowers, and who is not insensible to the 
vocal charms of these field and woodland musi- 
cians, can wear a butchered brown or red thrush, 
or any one of Nature's sweet singers, for that mat- 
ter, in her hat or bonnet, without being conscience- 
stricken, is more than I can imagine. I wonder 
that women of instinctive and tender refinement 
can do this thing; they do it, nevertheless, and with 
an air of utter unconsciousness of wrong. To bow 
without remonstrance to such a fashion would 
seem to make such a head-gear a badge of coward- 
ice ; but the firm stand taken by some women in 
this matter is to be admired, and lovers of these 
feathered songsters are grateful to know that 
woman's effort to induce her sex to discard the 
wearing of bird-ornaments has been in part suc- 
cessful. Killing birds and robbing bird's-nests 
when I was a boy were among the meanest and 
most contemptible things a boy could do, and, by 



158 RUNNING WATER. 

the unwritten law of the farm, it was a serious 
misdemeanor to do either, and for which the cul- 
prit was promptly treated to a taste of birch or 
apple-tree limb. I wish it were upon the statute- 
books of every State that not only the killing of 
birds, but the having in possession by milliners, 
and the wearing of their stuffed skins in whole, or 
in part, should be a misdemeanor punishable by 
fine. Such a law, in part, exists in many States, 
but it is a dead letter. There are equities in Nat- 
ure as in more abstract things, and the rights of 
the song-birds to protection at the hands of both 
farmer and citizen are based upon natural laws 
and sound moral principles. What thing so im- 
poverishes the human soul, until it dies of starva- 
tion, as Vanity ! 

II. 

If you will notice this huge beech, you will see 
much that is true of almost all trees. It is a 
huge trunk and hardly more than a man's height 
from the ground ; its lower branches reach out 
into the tops of this medley of birch-tree and sap- 
ling-maple that surround it, like retainers around 
their feudal baron of the woods. These branches 
reach out on all sides, forty, fifty feet, and even 
more, with an upward curve along their outer 
lengths that is very graceful and attractive. 



RUNNING WATER. 1 59 

There is one feature about the beech that is 
common to its kind ; its foliage, draped along less 
than a score of sprawling limbs, is an open net- 
work of living green, letting into its depths floods 
of sunlight. A bird's nest in a beech is a rarity, 
unless it may be that of a crow, which is not an 
uncommon incident in wood-lore ; but one may 
find a gray squirrel's nest in its top, for this fel- 
low lives out-of-doors in summer. Its buds, that 
a month ago were so brown and glossy, and 
shaped like elongated spear-heads in miniature, 
are now burst out into leaves of the lightest shade 
of green, that are almost transparent, and as soft 
as down, and so tender and juicy that the cattle 
find them sweet browsing. Later in the season, 
these downy leaflets will have expanded into their 
perfect growth, when the sun has dyed them a 
deeper, darker hue, and stiffened their grain or 
fibre, and added a brilliant gloss, as if each one 
had been coated with shellac. With the first 
frosts, they will fade out into amber, and drift 
down with every wind a shower of rustling leaves. 
One gets an idea of the quantity of leaves that 
cover these shapely limbs, as he scuffs through 
their depths in the hollows where the winds have 
blown them. 

The most attractive feature about the beech- 
tree is its massive stalwartness, as if Nature were 
calling you to look at one of her exhibits where 



l6o RUNNING WATER. 

strength and solidity were the predominating qual- 
ities, without any lessening of graceful proportion 
or airiness in the general effect. The beech is a 
native of rugged soils where the outcropping 
ledges of granite and deep-set bowlders give 
the grip of its outreaching roots something of 
stanchness as they seek sustenance from the 
friable earth of the woodlands. If you examine 
it critically, you will notice with what stout ribs 
its fluted base is braced against mother Earth's 
bosom. Dig out its roots and measure them ; add 
up their lengths and discover that there is an- 
other tree underground, that you have not seen, 
and that the aggregate linear proportions of this 
soil-hidden tree are not less than those of the 
tree that sways in the wind and sun over your 
head. Some trees, notably the elm and Gilead- 
ensis, extend their lateral roots to points rods 
away from the parent-tree, crossing even the sol- 
idly packed tread of the century-old highways, 
piercing cellar-walls, and dislodging oftentimes 
their largest stones and seriously impairing their 
foundations. 

This underground structure of the tree plays a 
double part. Its roots are the conduits or water- 
ways through which the tree-foliage draws its 
water, and by which it satisfies its thirst. Here, 
too, are the deep-laid foundations that brace the 
tree firmly against the heavy wind-storms that 



RUNNING WATER. l6l 

sweep down from the hills on sweltering hot sum- 
mer afternoons. Let the storm howl and buffet 
as it will, there is not a tremor among the close- 
knit fibres that make this stout body of the beech, 
though the limbs are twisted and torn from it, 
and carried far through the woods. Just under 
the gray rinds of limb and trunk and the brown 
rind of the roots are the delicate cells that hold 
the living matter of the tree. What tensive 
strength of fibre is here in this most non-elastic 
of forest-trees ! but what is true of the beech, in 
its essentials, is true of all trees. According to 
Dr. Goodale, in our Northern trees, the protected 
buds represent the possible growth during one 
spring and summer. The rapid expansion of the 
buds, during the late weeks of spring, is possible 
only through the abundant supply of constructive 
material laid up during the previous summer. 
When the bud-expansion has ceased, there is little 
further growth throughout the plant, except under 
the bark, where an additional thickening takes 
place. So the growth goes on from year to year, 
until the saplings have grown into monarchs of 
the woods. 

The roots of deciduous trees reach out into the 
soil laterally much farther than do those of the 
cone-bearing trees. An observer will have no- 
ticed that trees bear an expression characteristic 
of their kind, of shape, the fashion of their leaf, 



1 62 RUNNING WATER. 

the massing of their foliage ; and there is even a 
wider dissimilarity in leaf and bark, the rapidity 
and luxuriance of the tree-growth depending upon 
conditions of soil and exposure. A moist, strong 
soil and southern exposure afford the most favor- 
able conditions. 

Invert this huge old beech, with its wrinkled hide 
and sprawling limbs, upturn its feet, that set on the 
ground like ship's knees, into the air, and you will 
discover another tree, with more delicate organisms 
still. Nature does her rarest work in seclusion. 

This narrow cape of low-topped birches and 
slender maples, running from the pasture opening 
down into this sea of Conifers, is a favorite rest- 
ing-place of the woodland songsters. As we go 
down this primitive road in summer, dipping and 
rising, now into the hollows and now up over the 
mossy knolls, much after the flight of a wood- 
pecker, in its undulatory trend, we see but few of 
these out-door dwellings of the birds, but in fall 
or winter, when the winds have curried the bushes 
of their faded yellow coats, if one chances to 
come this way, he may discover hosts of curiously 
woven nest-dwellings deserted by their occu- 
pants, and empty but for the stray leaf or falling 
snow that has lodged in them. Each nest is a 
poem of prophecy. What a picture the snow-filled 
nest in winter, and what a dream-land lies within 
its whitened rim ! It is a heartless invader, this 



RUNNING WATER. 1 63 

child of the North, that drives our winged friends 
from their woodland homes, and wraps the woods 
in silence. One rarely finds the smaller wood- 
birds building their homes in the larger growths 
of timber, but rather among the alders and 
birches so plentifully sprinkled through their wet 
places and streaks of shallow soil where the 
lesser saplings find their home. 

On this bright June morning the birds are lively 
enough — and noisy enough, for that matter, if one 
can call a bird-note akin to noise. They are fairly 
boisterous in their appreciation of these opening 
days of summer. Here are scarlet tanagers, with 
their velvet-black wings, flashing like bits of flame 
between the bars of sunlight that drop here and 
there through the tree-tops, and the whole family 
of warblers, as well, flycatchers, titmice, nut- 
hatches, and the slate-colored snow-bird, keep 
jolly company with the glum cedar-bird, in his 
suit of Quaker drab and tiny markings of bright 
scarlet and Naples yellow. We do not seem to 
be regarded as intruders at all. All are " at home " 
to us, and fly along beside the cow-path as if by 
their chatter to show us some extra attention, or, 
more likely, because they wished to discover our 
errand, whether it tended toward the thresholds of 
their own homes or away. It must have been the 
latter, I think, for June is the month of eggs and 
fledglings. Only the blue-jays seem to avoid our 



164 RUNNING WATER. 

company, as usual, but it does not matter; one can 
always do without bad company and their bad 
manners. I never forget the brilliant coat of the 
tanager or the comical-looking fellow, with his tail 
cocked up in the air, well tipped toward his head, 
dropping, one by one, dolorous notes from his wren- 
throat. 

What enlivenment and warmth of glowing color 
this winged population lends to this land of shadows, 
but nowhere in their leafy depths can one escape 
the unmusical drawl of that " Flying Dutchman " 
among birds, the crow. His hoarse voice is in- 
cessant in its discordant hallooing from his quarry 
in the hemlock-tops, and the squawking of the 
young crows gets to be monotonous by mid-day, 
when, tired with their own clamor, they subside 
into a grateful quiet. This fellow is omnipresent 
in June, when the corn is thrusting its green spike 
up out of the brown loam of the recently planted 
corn-patch. If he does not twig at your button- 
hole, as some men do, he twigs at your corn-patch 
with a vengeance. He is a pestiferous concomitant 
of bird-life, like the hawk and his treacherous tribe. 

What swarms of midgets hover here and there 
in the path, a nebulous mass of motion ! How 
they dance up and down, always in one place and 
at about the same height from the ground ! The 
cattle have been this way within a brief space of 
time, for here are marks of their browsings by the 



RUNNING WATER. 1 65 

side of the path. The silken warps so industri- 
ously spun by the spiders, from side to side, have 
been torn down, and the ruins blow away in the 
light wind like strands of gossamer. What icono- 
clasts the cattle are among these temples of the 
smaller wood-dwellers. But here is a broad open- 
ing in the tops of the trees, and a big round shaft 
of sunlight drops down into the tangle of luxuriant 
polypody, their tall, flaunting pennons still wet 
with morning dew. How rankly they grow here, 
completely hiding the path, and reaching to the 
hips as we go through them. How blue the sky 
as we look up from this flood of green through the 
open tree-tops, and how white the clouds that sail 
so swiftly over our narrow outlook, against the 
pearly-hued masses of which is limned a circling 
flight of swallows that have wandered hither from 
the barns beyond the farm-ridge. 

Just below that knoll, crowned with the pink 
blossoms of the wild oxalis, with its whorls of light, 
yellowish green leaves, the wood-sorrel of boy- 
hood, is the fairest shrine in these wide woods. 
Here is a deep basin with steeply descending, 
fern-shadowed sides, a 

" poetic nook 
Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook." 

Ah, here are the fragrant-breathed cattle, knee- 
deep in water ! • Here is the old spring of cold, 
sweet water that supplied the pioneers of the early 



1 66 RUNNING WATER. 

settlement days, and all kinds of trees come to 
drink of its limpid depths, and what a jolly family 
they seem, whistling, singing, and soughing in 
response to every wind that blows up the pond 
or down over the hills. Here are rough-barked, 
gnarly, wide-armed beeches, broad-leaved lindens, 
stalwart canoe-birches, white and smooth-barked, 
their delicate limbs like ancient Flemish work, full 
of soft lines and dainty traceries and ruddy with 
the color of a rich Venetian red ; yellow birches, 
hung from topmost twig to base and sprawling 
root with their lavish adornment of amber spangles 
and streamers shimmering like old silver on sunny 
days against the grayer background of forest 
shadows, and tremulous with every breath of 
wind ; scrawny hornbeams, the iron-wood of the 
chopper, a stray white or river maple, a feathery- 
boughed hemlock, its low, drooping branches bent 
to the ground, with dwarf fir-trees and spindling 
pines in abundance, their tops mingled in pleasing 
confusion above the run of spring-water, where 
grow the richest and most luxuriant of woodland 
mosses and ferns, light green, terre-verte, with 
ever varying tone from warm to cool, and hosts of 
creeping vines for carpeting. From the top of this 
bank, deeply fringed with the drooping banners of 
the thick-growing ferns that bend down with grace- 
ful caress where the spring sings, — 

Bubble, bubble, bubble-up, bubble, — 



RUNNING WATER. 1 67 

the year round, through its rare filter of the 
whitest of white sancl, — hiding within their 
shadows a bit of bark from the canoe-birch, not 
long since used as a drinking-cup, and as idly 
tossed away after quaffing this woodland nectar, 
and that gleams in the summer sun like an ingot 
of old gold, — from this home of the Naiads we 
can see the silver track of the sun spanning the 
blue waters of the pond. Well might the poet 
say of this placid stream, as he did of another not 
more beautiful, — 

" So blue yon winding river flows, 
It seems an outlet from the sky, 
Where, waiting till the west wind blows, 
The freighted clouds at anchor lie," — 

and there is not less of pictured beauty here. It 
is all a fair midsummer's dream, with pink-stained 
columbines, and trilliums and humble housatonia, 
bell-worts and ginsengs, masses of climbing sweet- 
briar, tangles of meadow-rue and saxifrage, and 
tapestried mosses set with spikes of horse-tail ; the 
beautiful white orchis and lavender as well, and 
marsh-mallow, with overarching limbs of forest- 
trees for scenery, with birds and frolicsome squir- 
rels and the cattle for actors. What a rare 
theatre this ! 

Further down the run, the pine-trees are larger, 
and of older growth, indicating by their long, 
shapely, limbless bodies the once crowded family 



1 68 RUNNING WATER. 

of forest children, now depleted by the woodsman, 
and, as well, the ravages of decay. 

Oftentimes these young growths of timber crowd 
so thickly together that individual trees become 
dwarfed ; and, overshadowed by the more luxuri- 
ant' foliage of their companions, they drop one 
by one along the forest floors, food for a horde of 
fungi, and whose forms of transition are so varied 
and so beautiful. It is among these stalwart 
growths of the Coniferce that one finds many 
curiously beautiful things in Nature. Up and 
down their rugged rinds I discover rich specimens 
of the lichen, and always of the rarest tints and 
softest, velvety fabric ever woven in the looms of 
the woodland shadows. Lichens possess a great 
charm for me, with their variations of form, their 
depth and richness of color. But I find, too, queer 
specimens of fungoid growth as well, the genus 
polyporus being the most singularly beautiful and 
attractive, growing often to huge proportions, 
reaching out visor-like from the rind of some 
ancient oak or beech, or as likely a yellow birch. 
As I have discovered them in my woodland trav- 
els, I seemed to feel that a mischievous dryad was 
scanning my approach from within its crescent 
shadow, and I have stepped the lighter for the 
thought of my woodland sprite, as if I might come 
upon him unawares ; but all to no purpose, for he 
has eluded me so far, as I expect he always will. 



RUNNING WATER. 1 69 

These fungoid growths are the children of 
dampness and shadow, feeding upon the trees with 
smoothest bark, like the river maple, birch, or beech, 
and drinking their fill from every rain-shower and 
storm. The deeper the shadow, the more immense 
their proportions, and the richer and more varied 
the coloring. Sometimes their tops are of a deli- 
cate cream shade, with rippling lines of salmon 
tint near the outer rim, the lines growing darker 
and darker as they near the rind of the tree, until 
the tones are merged into a rich, warm brown, 
while, underneath, the rarest of ecru frescoing 
completes the decoration of this hooded portal. 
Sometimes the roofs to these bits of woodland 
architecture are covered with a glaze of such rare 
color and brilliancy as would drive a Minton or a 
Wedgewood to the end of his wits, to rival its 
dainty suggestions of sunlit sky and dun-hued 
cloud, while its arched ceiling is richly painted in 
old-gold and umber. They take on odd shapes, 
as well of regular as irregular contour, the most 
beautiful of which are those with scalloped edges, 
like the shells one discovers among the rocks and 
sands of the sea-shore. As fairy-like as they seem, 
they are so firmly fastened to the bark of the tree 
that they are dislodged only by sturdy blows with 
club or axe, and' so closely knitted their grain as 
to withstand the blade of the stoutest knife. 

Where the trees stand thickest, there is most 



170 RUNNING WATER. 

rapid decay. In a season or two after the death 
of the trees, decay sets in, rapidly devouring the 
alburnum, or sap-wood, of the tree. The great 
white borers puncture the bark, and soon make 
their way well into the body of the tree, working 
from the roots upward, excavating multitudinous 
tubular canals or highways which lie parallel to 
each other, making of the once solid tree-trunk 
the most beautiful and curiously wrought bits of 
architecture that one may find in the realm of 
Nature. Once begun, the work of the borer goes 
on incessantly, as you may discover for yourself 
if you will but put your ear to the gray bark of 
the dead pine by day or night. I have often 
wondered what sort of an implement this wood- 
land tunnel-builder used in his operations ; for to 
my ear it sounds very much like the wheezy twist 
of the old pod-auger of my boyhood days, when 
the fence-posts were being bored and mortised for 
the newly split rails of pine, or whenever a new 
yoke of maple or elm, or yellow birch like enough, 
was needed for the refractory steers, of which 
there were always one or more pairs about the 
barn. 

I have on many a bright June morning. perched 
myself upon the apex of the tall wood-pile which 
reached almost to the mid-top of the wide-limbed 
sugar-sweeting tree behind the wood-shed, the 
white and pink blossoms of the old apple-tree 



RUNNING WATER. 171 

drifting lightly, silently down about my shoulders 
with every breeze, and from thence watched my 
father plying the rude tools that comprised the 
limited carpentry equipment of those days. Here 
was the out-door workshop for the making of 
sleds, ladders, and such other handiwork, however 
rude and homely it may have been, as belonged to 
the husbandry of the farm, and of all the quaint 
reminiscences of which none has lingered with 
such distinctness as the asthmatic squeak of the 
old rusty auger, as it made its journey downward 
into pillar or post with every half-twist of its 
stubby, oaken handle ; a fit companion to the 
antiquated draw-shave, which had been so many 
times " upset " at the village smithy, and which 
was wont to share the honors with a plane 
of like remote ancestry, a narrow-bladed adze, a 
chisel or two, with maul of frizzled elm, and all 
of which were carefully housed, and kept beyond 
the reach of the youngsters. The old wooden 
"draw-horse," with its flaring legs with long foot- 
pedal between, and spring-pole atop of all, securely 
fastened to its unwieldy head with a castaway 
bit of clothes-line, and that has held many a 
birch hoop and oaken wheel-spoke between its 
upper and nether jaws in its time, may have 
suffered much perturbation of spirit at the dis- 
tinguished and delicate consideration shown the 
lesser tools while itself was left to shiver and 



172 RUNNING WATER. 

shake in the winter winds, or hide its head as 
best it could under the drifting midwinter snows, 
neglected and forgotten quite. There was for 
years an old pine log that haunted the shadow of 
this apple-tree, a great gnarled stick that was not 
worth the labor of working it into firewood, and 
to which the old " draw-horse " was firmly spiked 
at one end, which was to me the paradise of the 
Borer family. After the frost had departed and 
the warm weather had touched up the fields and 
budding trees with anticipations of springing 
grasses and singing birds, the wheezy grind of 
these wood-workers has begun, and many a curi- 
ous conjecture occupied my mind, in those days, as 
to the impelling motive that actuated these great 
white worms to such constant, unflagging industry. 
Many a time, while sauntering through the thick- 
leaved woods, I have come across the fallen trunk 
of some huge pine or spruce, overturned by some 
summer tempest or winter storm of damp, clog- 
ging snow, and have bent my listening ear to it, 
to be rewarded a moment later with the faint 
music of this master-workman among subterra- 
nean engineers ; and now, when in the woods 
with rod or gun, or perhaps with witless purpose, 
hosts of far-away recollections will come with 
every bar of this insect wood-worker's strident 
song. If I tap my appreciation upon the bark, 
my wood-working friend lapses into silence, to 



RUNNING WATER. I 73 

begin his boring anew a moment later with re- 
newed vigor. I detach some of the bark from 
this log in my search for the little fellow who is 
making all this music for me, but have only found, 
however, one of those beautiful mysteries which 
Nature hides away from those who are indiffer- 
ent to much of her charm. On the inner side of 
this bit of bark is a miniature tree, of snowy 
white, with well developed trunk, with spreading 
branches, and all the delicate film and interlacing 
of twig and leaf, and all soft as down as if 
worked with fairy fingers. It is a fungus known 
technically as a group of Mycelia, belonging to a 
low order of leafless, flowerless plants, numbering 
a half a hundred thousand species. They remind 
one very forcibly of the coarser frost-work on the 
window-pane of a cold morning, and are not the 
less beautiful or wonderful in their foliage-like dis- 
tribution of line and tracing which make up the 
picture before me, which is of the kind known as 
the Polyporns radula, the most active of all the 
fungi in taking from the cell-structure of the dif- 
ferent varieties of wood to which it attaches 
itself all the elements which they have assimi- 
lated or taken into their woody structure during 
their growth. The stripping-off of more bark 
will disclose further beauties in this land of fungi. 
Here is a bit of Polyporei in resupinate form, with 
its cream-like coloring and irregular contour, a 



174 RUNNING WATER. 

mass of soft fungous growth attached to the inner 
surface of the bark, much resembling a bit of 
dough thinly rolled out, but of rich, velvety text- 
ure, with orange-tinged edge, with just a sugges- 
tion of a fresh smell about it, and wonderfully cool 
to touch. Hawthorne's tales of Wonderland, dear 
as they are to the childish heart, do not approach 
in their quaintest, weirdest guise to the sugges- 
tion of magic that lies within the portals of the 
woods. 

A tramp through the woods must be one of in- 
dolent movement to be most pleasurable. There 
is so much to see, and so many things end up with 
an interrogation point, that the hours go, one 
hardly knows where, except that they are gone, 
and in their place have come hosts of pleasant 
sensations, and a rare fund of entertainment for 
days to come. Hours that leave their trace in 
oft-recurring thought are not flown, but are the 
rather fastened into one's present living, and move 
along from one day into another. Some get to be 
stragglers, and drop out ; but such as these, spent 
about the watering-places in the woods, are always 
in the vanguard of pleasing reminiscence. 

The cattle are here yet. How quietly they 
stand in the shallows of these living, ever running 
waters ! How lazily they swish their tails in mild 
remonstrance to the persistent attentions of the 
mosquitoes, whose nftmber is legion ! The black 



RUNNING WATER. 1 75 

flies sing their droning music in restless swarms, 
that get into one's face occasionally, which is disa- 
greeable enough ; but the shrill note of the mos- 
quito is the most exasperating. These insects 
are the vampires of the June woods. In these 
mosquito days the woodsman regards a shower of 
rain a blessing devoutly to be wished, for nothing 
diminishes the numbers of these lowland pests like 
the watery flail of a smart shower, unless it be a 
sharp autumn frost. Dodge our assaults as they 
will, dance up and down in the smoke of our 
smothered smudge-fire, they cannot escape the 
swift-falling, raking rain-drops, though their in- 
stinct teaches them to seek shelter under bits of 
bark, and within the interstices of the rough rinds 
of the trees, and under the leaves. I have turned 
a piece of hemlock-bark bottom side up, just after 
a rain, and there is a perfect swarm or colony of 
mosquitoes housed beneath its nether side, as dry 
as if the broadest roof in town were over them ; 
but the rain-drops come too suddenly for them to 
get to cover in season, oftentimes. The mos- 
quito does not seem to have the barometer attach- 
ment that is common to some insects, — at least, 
he does not get in out of the rain, as some of 
them do. Thrice blessed is the angler in these 
days to whom the presence of the mosquito brings 
no annoyance. 

The cattle are imperturbable. A drowsy flap- 



176 RUNNING WATER. 

ping of ears, a half-shake of the head is the only 
sign of animation, unless they are chewing the 
sweet cud of content, as they stand with hoofs 
deep in the floods of Nature's romance, for it is 
upon these slender threads of running waters that 
Nature strings her woodland emeralds, and within 
the shadows of their fountain-heads that she 
builds her Delphic oracles. Do you catch the 
song of summer in the faint rustling of the leaves 
of the white birch ? The cows hear the prophecy, 
and, with eyes half-shut, are lost in pastoral 
dreams. 

The sun is hidden in the cumuli that go sailing 
through the sky in the late forenoon. How gray 
the woodland has grown in this opalescent cloud- 
shadow ! The green leaves have a tinge of pearl- 
dust, so soft is the peculiar light reflected from the 
huge cloud that obscures the bright sun. The 
noon-hour has almost struck by the farm-house 
clock, and a sudden silence has fallen with this 
shadow. The red squirrel has put up his whistle, 
and, farmer-like, is taking his noonday nap. The 
crows are quiet for once ; the tanagers, the war- 
blers and wood-sparrows, the titmice and nut- 
hatches, and Downy, our orchard musician, our 
bone-player among the bird-minstrels, have disap- 
peared, and we are alone. 

It is not all silence ; for the ripple of this stream 
beats upon the air with a singularly metallic 



RUNNING WATER. 1 77 

rhythm, flowing along its sandy track toward the 
barrier left by the beaver family, when they moved 
out of town years ago, creeping through its 
broken dyke, to drop at last, with a clear, tinkling 
note, into the emerald flood of Pleasant Pond. It 
is here, where these cold waters drop down, that 
the iridescent perch and the silver-bellied chub 
come at sunup and sundown to drink, and to 
snap at the flies that make these inland ponds 
their habitats. It is here that one finds the red- 
spot of the pond, if anywhere ; but they are rarely 
tempted to rise, to worm or fly, at the hand of 
the angler. It is only the good-for-nothing fel- 
low, who was "born tired," who can tempt these 
finny Solomons from their staid indifference. 
The wind must be rarely right, from the south- 
ward, of course, and the sun must throw a rarely 
gray beam across the water, and the angler must 
be a rarely good fisher. A rare good trout-fisher 
is seldom good for anything else. He is the 
shirk of the hay-field and the loafer among the 
corn-rows. He is the shiftless fellow of the neigh- 
borhood, and witless in all else but snaring and 
trapping and fishing. He will take a twig of 
witch-hazel and find you an underground water- 
vein with it, or, most like, tell you when the rain 
is coming ; but in all else he is a child. His story- 
books are the fields and woodland nooks; his 
lamp is the sky, and his dreams are mingled with 



178 RUNNING WATER. 

the sound of ripraps in the meadow-brooks, with 
the reverberant long-roll of the partridge-drummer, 
and the piping of the upland plover. He is a 
common enough looking individual about the 
farm, but take him among the alders and meadow- 
rue, under the gray shadows of the elms, in mid- 
afternoon or on misty days, and he is, to the 
ordinary observer, as much a part of the meadow- 
landscape as its old barns and stumps, so silent 
and impersonal is he. I envy him his skill, but 
not the other qualities that enter into his make-up 
as a man, though his heart is ever as " big as that 
of an ox ; " but he does not seem to get so much 
out of life as he might if he were a bit more self- 
ish and farm-thrifty. It does not count, though, 
how many palaces a man may own, he cannot live 
in but one ; a man lives but one life, and there 
may be something in the fact that he lives it to 
suit himself, — a selfish thought, some may say, — 
but he who lives to suit others may find himself, 
like .^Esop's miller, the butt of his neighbor's 
jokes. But our fisherman is happy-go-lucky by 
nature ; otherwise, how could he be on such good 
terms with the trout ? He drinks from the brook 
where they swim, and I wonder if they whisper 
anything in his ear that he would not tell other 
people. If you ask him where the best fishing- 
ground may be found, he is silent. He knows, but 
his information is not for sale. His shrine is safe, 



RUNNING WATER. 1 79 

so far as his speech is concerned. If he asks you 
to go with him, he will show you where he suc- 
ceeds best, but not by word of mouth. He will 
teach you something of the art ; but, fish as you 
may, you get no rise, when hardly does his hook 
nip the stream and a lusty trout is dangling be- 
fore your astonished eyes. Do you see how silent 
is the drill of this troutster ? How deliberate, 
how slow, and with what method he makes his 
sport a livelihood ! Let him have his secret ; 
other people have theirs. Most men can catch 
trout where they abound, but to catch them where 
there seem to be none is the more difficult thing 
to do. Our fisherman of the woodland does this ; 
but how, or by what necromancy of the rod, I 
could never discover. 

This old watering-place, away from the haunts 
of men, is one of the secret places of Nature. 
How many such does she hold in her tree-girt, 
mossy cradles, with their sinuous water-lines, 
fern-embroidered, and rich in lowland blossoms ! 
There is no other music like that of this woodland 
fountain ; there is no other odor like that of these 
stalwart pines ; no cup that Hebe bore to the 
gods that held such amber-hued distillations from 
the inner recesses of mother Earth's bosom. 
What cooling sensations came in hot midsummer, 
as this vintage of the woodland spring trickled 
down the throat, or what rarer lotion for the sun- 



l8o RUNNING WATER. 

burned face than the drippings from this alembic 
of golden sand ! It is alike the solace of human 
and brute wayfarer. It is the milk upon which 
Nature suckles her healthiest and stoutest chil- 
dren. 



A SNUG CORNER. 



A SNUG CORNER. 

Oh, wondrous spell of sloping field, of tree and stream, 
Of winding ways that laughing waters take to reach 
The stilly pools aglow with amber tints of beech 

And scarlet flame of maples, with arrowy gleam 

Of gold, shot thro' the mesh of twig and leaf where dream 
And drowse among the breathless pines, with hushed speech, 
The topaz-gilded hours, a painter's palette each, 

Myriad color-strewn by artist hands supreme. 

Soundless the woodland's shadowy aisles ; the wavering fall 
Of slow-dropping things that to their burial creep, 

The startled partridge's whirring flight, the jay's shrill call, 
Above the cornfield's wind-blown stalks, are but the sweep 

Of Nature's tuneful touch, the preludes that forestall 
The grander symphonies that lull her world to sleep. 

ATURE is a rare landscape-painter. What 
rare technique and wonderful effect of 
chiaroscuro are hers ! No wonder, for it 
is a royal atelier, with its arched ceiling of blue 
and its ample north light, with wooded hills and 
mountains and slumbering valleys, with lakes and 
streams for garniture within which she sets up 
her easel. What broad brush-marks are those of 
the Sun, the Wind, and the Rain ! but with what 
bold, skilful touch are her luminous colors laid in, 
and not the less tender or sympathetic ! What a 

183 ' 




184 A SNUG CORNER. 

color-mixer is the Sun ! what vehicle like the 
Rain ! what dryer is superior to the Wind ! 

Back and forth across the gray canvas of April, 
Nature has drawn her palette-knife or crisp brush, 
with deft and subtile hand, and lo ! how swiftly 
the picture grows upon the vision ! The high 
places are crowned with garments of living green, 
the gaunt-limbed, unkempt orchards are hooded 
in clustering whiteness, and, as the days increase, 
the pastures are pink with kalmias. Each billowy 
field is bound about with snood of crimson sumac 
and tangle of medley-colored vine, with perfumed 
hedge where bees glide in and out, to make the 
quaint but beautiful legend of the old Grecian 
painter a living truth. 

Along the hill-slopes are splashes of gay clover- 
tints ; and, as the picture grows, there come gray- 
ish green domes of hay-stacks with amber levels 
of swaying grain between the hedges that bound 
the upland mowing-fields, or cropping out along 
the pine levels of the plainlands that lie just a bit 
above the lush intervales, in a brilliant contrast of 
color. On the rim of the woods are the deepen- 
ing shadows of mid-afternoon thunder-gusts with 
threats of wet and hail ; and then a mistiness of 
falling rain when Sirius, with his brush wet with 
drizzling fogs inland-driven from the sea, sets his 
blurred signature to the fairest sketch of Summer. 
But another day and a swift flame is kindled on 



A SNUG CORNER. 1 85 

the sloping woodland roofs, and from the pinna- 
cles of their sanctuaries fly hosts of pennons in 
scarlet and yellow that fade with every added 
nightfall. Whence comes this dreamy haze, this 
suggestion of celestial blue, as if some master- 
hand had sought to hide, with just a perceptible 
scumbling of ultramarine ash, the garish hues of 
a full year of brilliant dyes ? How swiftly has our 
mighty painter wrought this Masterpiece of Indian 
Summer ! But Nature has dug the very bottom 
of her paint-pots out. She has squeezed her tubes 
of rarest color dry, and now piles her palette deep 
with flake-white ; meanwhile, who is this who with 
cheery whistle and jaunty air takes one by one 
these treasures of the fleeting autumn to himself, 
with but scant courtesy, to set up in their stead 
a grayer, thinner canvas still ? 

" Folk say, a wizard to a Northern king 

At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show 
That through one window men beheld the spring, 
And through another saw the summer glow, 
And through the third the fruited vines arow; 
While, still unheard, upon its wonted way 
Piped the shrill wind of that December day." 

This fellow is a wizard, but the windows that look 
out upon the spring-time and the warm, drowsy 
days of summer are closed, and the draperies are 
close-drawn ; the days are full of gray shadows 
and ominous silences. Some call our visitor 



I bo A SNUG CORNER. 

wizard of the North. He is a painter, too, but 
his studies are mostly in monochrome. Some- 
times he etches beautiful things upon the house 
window-panes, but the sun plays critic on such 
occasions, and, critic-like, thinks himself to have 
found here and there a defect, until the etcher, 
poor in spirit, drops his needle in disgust. These 
critics do not make such sad havoc with a fellow's 
work, after all, for Nature is not less the master- 
etcher when she covers these self-same window- 
panes with rarer and more wonderful traceries 
still, or when, with the biting north winds, she 
sharply outlines the bare tree-tops against the 
royal background of her ruddy sunsets. She has 
no fixative, Only the rare quality of reproduction, 
for she uses the same old canvas, washed clean by 
equinoctial storms. 

How cleanly have the woods and hedges by 
the walls and fences been raked by the hustling 
winds ! what gray perspectives and sombre fore- 
grounds await these studies in pure white that 
are to come in the silence of the night ! Across 
the top of the broad canvas drive the leaden 
masses of snow-laden cloud, the huge brushes of 
the wintry limner of the woods and brown fields, 
for the days are done when 

Between the bared and waiting branches of the wood 
The mellow autumn haze, with subtile mood, 



A SNUG CORNER. 187 

Weaves silently its filmy, golden web, 
And, tireless as the ocean's flow and ebb, 
Urges its noiseless shuttle o'er the hills and streams 
To fill the closing idyl of the year with dreams. 

This artist owns no niggling hand ; his touch is 
sure and trenchant. His windy wrist is tireless, 
and down the sky, across the earth, it sweeps, to 
leave its trail of pictured whiteness wrought in 
dainty traceries and thick-woven webs of snow. 
How loud the praises of the Sun, with every wan- 
dering flake or frosty pellicle a jewel of prismatic 
beauty. 

Nature is Poet, Painter, Philosopher all in one, 
and Orator even, if one is to take the word of the 
Wind for the fact. I have listened to the speech 
of the Wind when it moved its audience as a man 
might never do. As for philosophy, had there 
never been any philosophy in Nature there would 
never have been any in the books. It is needless 
to repeat what critics would call a platitude, that 
Nature offers a scope for study that is boundless ; 
but there are some things that have to be told to 
men over and over again. Skulls are thicker in 
some instances than others, and it is only by a 
dint of pounding that their possessors can be 
made to see more than one thing at a time. 
I am here reminded of those people who see 
in the lush grasses of June and its royal color- 
ing only the tint of a certain circulating me- 



100 A SNUG CORNER. 

dium, at one time known to political economists 
as " rag money ; " a needful thing in itself, and 
yet only a minor means to the real happiness 
of men. Nature's field is the superficies of the 
whole earth, and its contents as well. It is not 
too much to say that her better secrets are as yet 
unapplied, are mysteries still. Men may glory in 
their discoveries of metals, of steam and of elec- 
tricity ; but, metaphorically speaking, the key is 
still at the bottom of the well. It is only with 
infinite patience that the tangled skeins are un- 
done. The chemist who has given years of 
thoughtful experiment to the unravelling of a 
single one of Nature's countless enigmas, and who 
may find himself baffled at the very door of dis- 
covery, will tell you that. Nature's every phase 
is a lesson, a faith-bearer to men. One might 
well take this truth to heart, this perfect enuncia- 
tion of the Eternal Activity. 

Were it not for Nature, I doubt if Faith could 
find seed-ground or seed-time; without these the 
harvest-time would be long deferred. Nature is 
constantly telling men to do; so a faith that is 
constantly dieted upon an introspective menu, and 
not fed upon the outward activities of a real 
human living, has no sustaining quality. A miller 
might as well hoist his water-gates, and, with the 
rushing tide that leaps headlong against his wheel, 
set his grindstones awhir beneath their empty 



A SNUG CORNER. 1 89 

hoppers, and then watch the endless belt of meal- 
cups go up and down, holding his hands under 
their wooden spout to catch the golden grist that 
never comes, with as much reason as to believe 
that faith will pry a rock or pull a stump from 
out the ground without a combination of muscle 
and crowbar or a stump-machine and a yoke of 
oxen. 

A painter believes in his ideal ; but no one 
knows how lofty or how beautiful that is, until his 
brush has spoken. One may dream of the woods 
and the soft-falling shadows that linger about the 
feet of the eternal hills whose vestiture they 
make, or of the "eternal sunshine" that lights 
up their countenances by day ; but until he has 
stood upon their summits, and gazed out upon 
the sea of cloud below, there is no substance to 
the dream. A religious faith has no nourishment 
from a soil that lies fallow the year through. To 
believe is one thing; to feel and know is quite 
another, and more. Knowledge comes from do- 
ing. We love the out-door life, because it is 
above the petty meannesses that beset pent-up 
humankind. A wild apple-tree may bear puckery 
fruit, but it has the virtue of being a vigorous and 
natural product. The trained fruit-bearers of the 
orchard make ample compensation for the poverty 
of their unreclaimed brethren. 

I have often wondered if that thing: which is 



I90 A SNUG CORNER. 

called the "milk of human kindness" were not a 
myth, only that Nature dispenses so much "milk" 
of her own. How different she is from the peo- 
ple who live upon her ! It has seemed to me, 
for all that homely quality is so much talked 
about and admired by those who think themselves 
to have it in so large a degree, most men prefer 
to milk their neighbor's herds, while their own are 
well beyond their neighbor's reach or are safely 
locked within their own barns. People don't care 
to have their own udders stripped, if they can 
avoid it, and save their own reputation. Some 
people, I find, are successful in doing both. I find 
a great crop of good, profitable faith growing wild 
in the pastures sometimes, as sweet-smelling as 
the wild flower or modest arbutus that grows 
beside it ; but that is no phenomenon, as wild 
things, that is, Nature, are akin to the better 
culture ; but I find another kind of faith growing 
in the flowerless gardens of some other people, 
where "good works" has gone to seed long ago, 
and only the blackened stalks remain, silent and 
yet full of speech, to point the moral. All good 
action implies a lively trust of some kind, else 
why the doing ? Nature sets the example in her 
deepest snowfall as in her falling orchard fruit. 
It is what men do, rather than what they borrow 
from an artificially sustained creed, that makes 
them humane and lovable. 



A SNUG CORNER. 191 

One thinks much of humankind and of human 
ways, when most profoundly touched with the sim- 
plicity and beauty of the common things that lend 
their charm to the sketch of a single day, even in 
the woods and fields. Some people are hardly 
more than walking sticks, endowed with vitality 
and some sort of a soul. The soul has a com- 
plexion and a physiognomy, a countenance of its 
own, as does the face, that serves it as a mask, 
though some seem unaware of the fact. The ab- 
sence of soulful quality is as discernible in the 
face as would be any of its characteristics. 

One who sees in the natural distribution of 
things about him something to admire, be it no 
more than a wilding flower, and whose admira- 
tion for it is sincere and heart-felt, is in some de- 
gree a poet. George Eliot says : — "To be a poet 
is to have a soul so quick to discern that no 
shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel 
that discernment is but a hand playing finely or- 
dered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul 
in which knowledge passes instantaneously into 
feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ 
of knowledge." One may be a poet and not be 
able to make a line of written poetry. The soul 
sings to itself what it cannot sing to others, and 
this is the rarest poetry of all. People are like 
musical instruments under the master's hand, 
with here and there a discord, or a note out of 



192 A SNUG CORNER. 

tune. The boy who looks out upon the yellow 
levels of buttercups with a thrill of delight is as 
much the painter, in his soul, as the one who, with 
brush, fastens their fleeting beauty to his canvas, 
though in less degree. A painted buttercup, like 
poetic thought written out, like a bird-song 
translated into speech of men, is the intelligent 
expression of this "feeling." There are both 
speech and song in the picture. There is a po- 
etic inspiration in both. 

A brilliant tone of color in Nature, like a line 
of beauty in a school-boy's copy-book, or the grace- 
note in a bar of music, is a suggestion of some- 
thing else. The color-tone may be pitched lower 
down among the siennas and sombre umbers, the 
line may be coarsely, clumsily drawn, but it tells 
the same truth as its fellow higher up the scale, 
though it may not be so elaborate or attractive. 
Nature carries abundant suggestion of all these in 
her variety and change, paint her pictures as she 
will. It has been long years since I left her by- 
ways and every-day life, but, like Michael Angelo, 
" I carry my satchel still," and there are many un- 
finished as well as finished sketches within its 
familiar depths. Let me show you a single sketch 
from this satchel of mine. Not long since, I saw 
a team of oxen hauling a huge stick of timber 
down one of the thoroughfares of the city. The 
day was one of winter's coldest, clearest, and the 



A SNUG CORNER. 1 93 

heavily loaded " bobs " sang their creaky song 
along the snow-packed highway, calling people to 
look at their magnificent burden, this monarch of 
the woods, as it went its way to the mast-yards, to 
be stripped of its thick black bark, and smoothed 
with draw-shave and plane into the shapely mast, 
that is to be stepped into some goodly ship, 
to sail around the world. What a romance was 
written along the length of this stalwart moun- 
tain-pine ! The muzzles of the sturdy red oxen 
and their wide flanks are frescoed with the crys- 
tallized breath of winter. What pungent smell is 
this that steals across the street ? but I hear the 
lusty shout of the driver, — 

" Waugh-osh ! " 

" Gee Buck ; what yer doin' thar ! " 

" Huh-Bright up ! " 

He wields his ox-goad bare-handed, as a knight 
his lance. How it glistens in the sunlight, never 
whiter or more brilliant, this rustic weapon ! 
This fellow, like his oxen and huge mast-stick, 
grew among the hills. His wind-toughened face 
is half-hidden in a bush of sandy whiskers, that 
are better than wrap for the neck. A black 
slouch hat is on his head ; a jerkin of home-made 
stuff in white and blue takes the place of an over- 
coat, and, with trousers of like rough material, 
tucked into stout cow-hide boots that seemed the 
counterpart of a pair I once wore myself, the tout 



194 A SNUG CORNER. 

ensemble is complete. What a picture of rustic, 
breezy manhood is this fellow, driving his team 
adown these avenues of the New Civilization, 
and never more unconscious of the genre picture 
his advent brings to town ! 

The smell of the barn comes with him. He 
cares not for the cold ; he is used to it. I appre- 
hend he has a feeling of pity for humanity on the 
sidewalk, with its hands mittened or gloved, and 
its head smothered in wrappings of fur. He 
scouts the thin blood that cries out for such cum- 
brous coverings. Himself a veritable child of 
Nature, right royally he bears her truest impress. 
What hints of rugged, homely sense and grit 
come with the straightforward glance of his 
clear blue eyes ; and what other hints of well 
poised purpose balance themselves along the clear- 
cut lines of forehead and nose ! A rare pride and 
strength lie along the curving lips that play at 
hide and seek beneath their tawny moustache. I 
think to myself, Ah, here is the stock of which 
men are made, as in this hundred feet of pine-tree 
is the material for the making of a mast. Who 
knows but what one might find upon this huge 
trunk the trace of the king's arrow, made by the 
mast-surveyor of Colonial days ? Who knows but 
this stalwart teamster's remote ancestor was one 
of Concord's farmer heroes ? I doubt not but 
this mast-stick was a large tree then. 



A SNUG CORNER. 1 95 

The oxen throw jets of steamy breath straight 
out from their nostrils, as they answer the hail of 
their driver for a stout pull up the sharp rise of 
the street ; and so they go over its crest on their 
way to the wharves, the sleds singing and creak- 
ing in a shrill-voiced accompaniment to this win- 
ter pastoral that has strayed away from the inland 
hills and valleys. 



II. 



I find another sketch that was made years ago, 
that is not less pleasant than the one the reader 
has just seen. Amid the glimmering splendor of 
a snow-white landscape I see the low, black roofs 
of clustering barns and their outlying sheds. I 
hear the clattering of unloosed bows, the rattle 
of stanchion-chains, and the muffled, uneasy tread 
of the horn-shod cattle as they hasten through a 
narrow linter-door into the snow-drifted barn-yard. 
Above the barred gateway of the ample yard I see 
the white spears of cattle-horns glancing in the 
morning sun. I hear the snow-smothered sound 
of rattling, down-dropping bars. The cattle are 
going to the old watering-place under the hill. 
Slowly, and one by one, the oxen lead the way 
down over the sharp crest of the ten acre lot be- 
low the highway, along the upper edge of which 



196 A SNUG CORNER. 

are grouped the ancient farm-buildings ; the steers 
follow closely behind, and then come the cows 
with their stubby horns and shrunk udders and 
glossy, short-haired coats, pictures of sober staid- 
ness, and, last of all, the last season's calves, with 
their long hair all awry as with short, nervous 
step they make up the procession to the spring 
just within the margin of the wood, the snuggest, 
warmest corner in all the pasture. It is a proud 
array of kine that winds its way down the sinuous 
track, through deeps of snow, wind-piled and 
drifted into the semblance of a white, choppy 
sea, and that sleep arow in the long tie-up that 
runs the whole length of the larger hay-barn. 
How narrow is this pathway ! so narrow, indeed, 
that if the leader stops in his progress either way 
the trail is clogged until he moves on. How they 
hook and prod each other with their curved spears, 
in their haste to get out of the keen-bladed wind, 
for the crest of this slope was the runway for 
every winter gale ! How the wind blows on this 
day in particular ! The depth of three feet above 
the surface of the snowy field is a mass of wind- 
driven snow-crystals. So with lowered heads, with 
backs rounded up against the stiff north-west wind, 
the last of the herd has disappeared over the slope. 
I follow their track through this immaculateness 
of winter, its stain of the uncleanliness of the 
linter-floors, with my eye, until it passes without 



A SNUG CORNER. 1 97 

the shelter of the long sheds, where it is obliter- 
ated by the brush of the wind. 

No sooner are the cattle well out of the barn 
than the snow-embargoed hens are busily scratch- 
ing among the shorts in the shallow cribs after a 
stray kernel of corn or a grain of meal, with the 
occasional interruption on the part of some pullet 
that has laid her mistress an egg and who hastens 
to tell the hen community of her achievement. 
What a chorus ensues ! It is a sort of vocal con- 
stitutional these feathered people indulge in upon 
such occasion ; and the uproar is a combination 
of all sorts of hen dialects in one, for here are 
Plymouth Rocks, Cochins, Brahmas, and the 
farmer's wife knows what all, agog with Henny- 
penny's gossip of her own private affairs. The 
hen is truly feminine, as her pride and excitability 
over her domestic doings show. All things, big 
and little, call for equal ado and a like attention ; 
but they make a good orchestra for the barn these 
dull winter days, and keep the cattle some sort of 
company, with their fussy ways and garrulous 
cackle. They make a good pot-pie at Thanks- 
giving time, and the mistress of the farm gets a 
nice gown for her chicken. As Beecher has said, 
" The greatest event in a hen's life is made up of 
an egg and a cackle." The same is true not infre- 
quently of men whose greatest achievements are 
of minor importance, of which the world is never 



I98 A SNUG CORNER. 

done hearing. The farm-horse whinnies to be 
led to water, but, in this instance, is the last to 
be served. There is an art in the doing of the 
chores at the barn. How clean the long linter 
looks after it has been purged of its soiled bed- 
ding and newly sprinkled with wheat-chaff from 
the straw-scaffolds ! But what pungent odors 
linger about the stanchions and the wide floors ! 
There is health in the smell of the cattle tie-up. 
Here is a panacea for lung and throat troubles, in 
this ammoniated atmosphere. How the nostrils 
dilate at its inbreathing! It is like the scents from 
the newly ploughed ground, only a thousand times 
increased. It is the concentration of life-giving 
soil-strength, the pledge of fertility. By what 
rare processes of Nature is its rank pungency 
transmuted into the perfumed blush of the north- 
ern clover or the rarer sweet of the humble honey- 
suckle ? As homely as its contemplation may be, 
the manure-heap of the barn-yard is the compensa- 
tion that Nature insists upon in exchange for her 
rich yield of fruit and grain. It is the philoso- 
pher's stone to the farmer. Its treasures of 
phosphates and ammoniacal salts lend their rare 
quality to the sun-tanned complexion of grape and 
pear, as to the amber-bearded wheat and yellow 
Indian corn. Its inherent quality of productivity 
and reenforcement of Nature's needs is ample ex- 
cuse for its pungent and, to some, offensive perfume. 



A SNUG CORNER. I99 

In imagination I untie a stout rope halter in 
the horse-stall, and lead its inmate out through 
the barn, out across the sunny yard, with its 
southern outlook, hedged in at all the other points 
of the compass with low, sloping, snow-laden 
roofs, out into the white waste of the field. The 
cattle-tracks of a half-hour ago are blown full of 
snow, and I follow the barely perceptible ridge or 
drift, which always backs up to the windward side 
of the path, more by the feeling of the snow 
under my tread than by any visual aid. I re- 
member when this smooth hill-side was a ledgy, 
rock-piled pasture, when every crevice among its 
outcropping ribs of granite owned its nest of mot- 
tled adders, the only creeping things for which I 
had a boyish dread. I have not quite gotten over 
the feeling in these later days. I have seen as 
many as half a hundred of these oviparous rock- 
dwellers killed in a single day's ploughing, and 
have known them to be encountered and killed, 
one or more, every day through the summer sea- 
son in this very field ; but, like the wolf and otter 
of the woods, the rattle-snake and this more 
dandified adder recede as man encroaches upon 
their unreclaimed domain ; and I doubt if a sharp 
search about this field nowadays would show a 
single adder basking upon the ledges in the hot 
summer sun — this fellow's royal pastime, unless 
it, is playing havoc with the eggs and fledglings 



200 A SNUG CORNER. 

of the sparrows, and other ground-nest builders. 
I once saw an adder climbing up through a thorn- 
bush's net-work of limbs, dodging their long, slen- 
der thorn-needles, with no less an object than a 
brood of tiny yellow-birds, and he seemed to have 
no difficulty in getting well up into the tree. I 
let the fellow climb almost to the rim of the nest, 
as I wished to see how much of a tree-climber he 
was, and then I sent a stone whizzing into the 
bush. His snakeship stopped his ascent, twist- 
ing his head to one side in a dazed sort of a way, 
and then slid rapidly to the ground, where I bur- 
ied his secret with himself, to the evident satisfac- 
tion of the parent-birds, who seemed stupefied, 
rather than in a high state of excitement, as they 
watched the progress of the adder toward their 
nest. 

But how the wind smites one's face in these 
mid-January days. I apprehend my companion 
does not fancy the wind's taking such arrant 
liberties with his long, flowing mane and tail of 
chestnut color. He throws up head and heels in 
turn, laying his delicately pointed ears flatly back, 
and with now and then a sharp pull at the halter 
his complaint is ended. It is only a good-natured 
protest, this restiveness under the provocation of 
the snow-weaponed winds. It is a human quality. 

Half-way to the rim of the woods the pitch of 
the slope is like that of a steep house-roof, down 



A SNUG CORNER. 201 

sharply against the edge of the beech-woods. At 
its foot is a long line of broken stone and debris 
of the ledges, that makes a good enough barrier 
against the encroachment of the cattle on its past- 
ure-side in summer, roughly thrown together and 
unbuilt as it is ; and many a time, on a wild coast, 
I have jumped my rude country-sled over its rag- 
ged ramparts, hidden as they were under a glit- 
tering March crust, to pull up amid the jungle 
of leafless white-thorn, that made the abatis-edge 
of the woods below ; and sometimes, striking the 
entrance of the old logging-wood, I have not 
stopped until among the tall spruces, that were 
ever willing to pay their humble tribute of amber 
solace, that hung, oftentimes, from some out- 
reaching knot in shapely transparent pendants — 
"tits " they were, according to the nomenclature 
of boyhood. What an outlook of winter one gets 
from this upland crest ! Far below are the 
beeches, the stalwart hemlocks in their black 
garb, the firs, that serve as a bit of evergreen 
trimming to this great temple or body of decidu- 
ous trees, a mass of pearly-gray color, warm and 
soft, with the clear winter sunshine filtering 
through the open net-work of their leafless 
branches. There are hints of rare shades and 
colors in the beech-tree tops that lie so still at 
my feet while the wind is "doing" its forty miles 
an hour easy-like along this hill-slope, jumping 



202 A SNUG CORNER. 

the trees just under the hill to ruffle the pine- 
woods into a sea of grayish green half a mile 
beyond, as if this child of Eurus was no less than 
the fabled possessor of the Ogre's seven-league 
boots, the history of which, in those days, was 
closely connected with the fortunes of the Duch- 
ess of Draggletail. 

It is at the southerly corner of these beech- 
woods that the spring is hidden. Above, below, 
and beyond it, for miles and miles up and down 
the valley, even to the very foot-hills of New 
Hampshire's White Hills, it seems an unbroken 
wilderness of woods. Look south or west : 
hardly a dozen farm-houses are in sight. Here 
seems to be a primitive country in this garb of 
midwinter. The long chain of meadows, scarce a 
half-mile away, is barely suggested by its sagging 
line or fold in the matted tops of the woods, 
except by the gable of a single barn. There is 
hardly a wrinkle in this figured tapestry-fabric of 
the tree-tops, with its predominant tone of drab, 
so smoothly is it laid across the breadth of widen- 
ing lowlands. One sees as many colors in the 
winter as in the summer woodland, but they are 
to be searched for if they are to be seen. They 
are all about and within the winter landscape, and 
would show the more readily did not the white- 
winged winter troubadours, the flying snow-flakes, 
pitch the tone to their color-song on such a barren 



A SNUG CORNER. 203 

staff, a staff ice-rimmed and smothered with crys- 
tal drifts, with hosts of snow-buntings for notes. 
It is a rare picture that is hung against the sky 
when the west is flushed with the brief splendor 
of a winter sunset, when this sea of forest is 
flooded with a glory that is simply indescribable, 
and when every upward-pointing twig is tipped 
with flame and swimming in an atmosphere 
every atom of which is a particle of reflected 
gold. What a world of color in the sky above, 
and on the snow-levels beneath, tinted with the 
faintest suggestion of crimson ! What strong 
high-lights gild the rails and stakes in the fences 
along the uplands, such as one finds hints of in 
the garb of these bird-dwellers of the winter 
woods, the buntings, finches, the red-polls, and 
the pine grosbeak. It is no wonder that these 
winged wanderers chance to steal something of 
the hue of the sky as they dart hither and thither 
through it. 

Just under the hill the path comes out more 
distinctly, for here the snow is asleep among the 
tops of the ferns and the ground-hemlock, the 
creeping yew of the New England pastures. The 
cattle have not hurried here, once out of the wind, 
and their track winds in and out among the dwarf 
thorns and scrub-pines in an indolent sort of a 
way, as if the oxen had stopped to browse upon 
some winter tidbit that came in sight. Down 



204 A SNUG CORNER. 

nearer the woods the trail divides into several 
others, like the delta of a stream, but all come 
together again at the spring. 

I have thought often, as I came upon these 
watering-places in the woods, that I might liken 
them to the faces of people I knew, and whose 
facial characteristics had something of similarity, 
only to find upon comparison a marked dissimi- 
larity. There are always the same brown and 
green carpetings of velvety mosses and tender 
herbage about them and their thresholds ; the 
same pellucid stream of sweet waters ; the same 
overhanging deeps of foliage in summer and the 
same low-swaying, leafless limbs in winter; the 
same winding approaches through the black loam 
and ooze of muck; and, with some exceptions, the 
same gnarled prodigal of the apple-orchard, drop- 
ping its brownish gray leaves and streaked wild 
fruit into the liquid-filled cup beneath it. Just at 
this time of the year, these attractions are absent, 
as the thick coverings of the snow have hidden 
much of its summer carpeting, and only the 
evergreens wrap their shadows round about such 
vagrant strips as the sun and warm waters of the 
spring have laid bare. Here are two apple-trees, 
the guardian spirits of this beautiful home of the 
water-nymphs ; with wide-branching tops, with 
here and there a frozen apple clinging to the 
slender, tapering fingers of twigs that are barely 



A SNUG CORNER. 205 

ever stirred by rude winds. It is not singular 
that the snow should be so well trodden about 
their rugged trunks by the cattle ; for a frozen 
apple is in some sort a dainty to the barn-fed 
herd, and this is one of their loitering-places after 
they have quenched their thirst at the never fail- 
ing — in winter or summer — stream, hardly a rod 
away. 

I was as fond of these frozen apples as were 
the cattle. When apples were abundant, these 
trees were often left untouched by the farm-folk, 
and many a winter foray was made among their 
leafless tops to garner what had been left by the 
November winds and the squirrels of their frost- 
bitten fruit. Months before, the apples had been 
gathered in the orchards and carted to the old cider- 
mill ; and their juices, pressed out, were stored in 
the dark cellar of the old homestead, where they 
grew sour and "hard," and only fit for dyspeptics 
or the vinegar -barrel. The soft, yielding, delicious 
flavor of their earlier days has departed, and a 
sharp, biting, acidulous quality has come instead ; 
but the memory of their sweetness lingers. A sip 
of new cider dripping fresh from the press is like 
the breath of apple-blossoms, possessing much of 
their subtle aroma and generous suggestion ; but 
how different this amber-colored treasure of the 
earlier winter, impoverished by lack of its natural 
associations, its sunshine and tree-saps, its delicate 



206 A SNUG CORNER. 

pulp and ruddy, hermetic coverings, grown thinner 
and lighter-colored by feeding upon its own sweets. 
It is like the vigorous tree itself, self-willed, virile, 
and suggestive of the biting flavor of the apple- 
twig from which the ripened fruit dropped as the 
October suns went down day after day. Many a 
basket of these brown frost-bound apples from the 
trees over the spring in this snuggest corner of 
the woods found their way up over the hill to the 
farm-house, after the winter school was over and 
the stout crusts had come with their sparkle and 
exhilaration, to be emptied into the big milk-pans 
and set beside the fireplace to thaw. The porta- 
ble cheese-press, with its wooden lever and basket 
of cobble-stones, would be brought into the kitchen, 
and, with the thawed apples tied in a stout bag and 
placed in the ash cheese-hoop, the round bit of 
pine board in place and the lever at last adjusted, 
the improvised cider-mill was in active operation. 
It was a delightful anticipation that greeted the 
first trickling drops of the amber stream that made 
way for the flood that was to follow. How thirsty 
I was until I had tasted this nectar fresh from the 
heart of winter ! It was a wild flavor this wood- 
land fruitage owned, with its hints of frost and 
wind and snow, its mystery of woodland acquaint- 
ance. It smacked of woodland odors, of rustling 
leaves and of hoyden out-door dwellers. Ah, here 
is something fitting with which to toast Nature ! 



A SNUG CORNER. 207 

Here is Life, Virility, Strength in this current of 
molten amber, and Food. No wonder the cattle 
haunt these trees for their favors. Nature's chil- 
dren know her secrets better than Man, with all 
his wisdom. It was not an infrequent event that 
the apple-trees by the roadside were visited, as I 
went my way to the winter school, for a stray 
apple left by the apple-gatherer, and as well over- 
looked by the chipmonks ; and at the school-house, 
deposited in a dark corner of the desk, it was left 
to thaw while the lessons went on to one recess or 
another, when it was made to supply food and 
drink to the ever hungry boy. Not less welcome 
was the sight of a tree among the pasture-birches 
that had escaped the notice of the thrifty farmer, 
when out with gun after the rabbits that were 
always so plenty in Knight's Woods, tired and 
hungry and thirsty with so much trudging through 
the winter snows. How tempting and appetizing 
these waifs of autumn ! There was a rare vigor 
and exhilaration in the melting frost-crystals of a 
winter-stranded apple. Bitter and unpalatable as 
it may have been in October, it has been mellowed 
and tempered by wind and snow into a delicious 
confection. How freely if gives out its juices 
under the coaxing heat of one's mouth ! These 
delights are not overdrawn, simple and hearty as 
they seem. They are real to one who has enjoyed 
them, and, once tasted, are never to be forgotten. 



208 A SNUG CORNER. 

They are a part of the largess of Nature, nor 
are they dropped at one's door ; they must be 
gone after to be possessed. They are no gratui- 
tous gift, but are to be earned like all other good 
things. 

Looking back over the way I have come, only 
the broken, uneven face of the pasture, and the 
steep slope of the ten-acre lot, with its barrier of 
rambling walls, and near its top, a bit to the 
north, its thick clump of sumac-bushes, is in 
sight ; unless the square, red chimney of the hip- 
roof farm-house, with a single glimpse of a pointed 
barn-gable, and the topmost ribs of the elm-tree's 
swaying, shapely dome over all, may make the 
perspective of this uplook. North of the cattle- 
trail are acres of hoary beeches, with immense 
trunks closely huddled together with their barri- 
cade of low-hung limbs that reach straight out 
into the opening, and that rise above each other ; 
tier upon tier of gray cJievaax-de-frise, that lend a 
finish to this interweaving of branch and tiny 
twig that hold up the roofs of these hard-wood 
growths. Southward and eastward are the stunted 
sapling-pines, the cones of the spruce and fir ; 
as shapely as if trimmed by some landscape- 
gardener ; the limbs of which reach to the base of 
their pitch-stained trunks, making, with their dark, 
close-knit foliage, impenetrable jungles ; and which 
afford hiding-places for the foxes and rabbits, and, 



A SNUG CORNER. 209 

as well, an excellent cover for that beautiful game- 
bird of Maine, the bonasa umbelliis of the orni- 
thologist, the partridge of the outlying woodlands 
of the farm. The pasture follows the southerly 
trend of this evergreen growth a half-mile or 
more, and within its margin is the stalking-ground 
for all the pot-hunters of the region hereabout. 
As wary and difficult to approach as is this beau- 
tiful and well known bird, its instinct was hardly a 
safeguard against the stealthy cunning that, in 
the latter days of August of each year, crept, with 
noiseless step and old-fashioned muzzle-loading- 
gun, over the thousand-ply carpet of sienna-dyed 
needles that were constantly dropping from the 
matted tops of these lowland Coniferce. The floor 
of these woods is marvellously clear of all under- 
brush, except here or there a " drumming-log " or 
a clump of red-fruited thorn ; and the partridge- 
stalker may discover his game at a considerable 
distance down these silent, tree-shadowed aisles, if 
his eyes are trained to his sport. Hardly has the 
bird discovered its enemy than it has straightened 
up as motionless as the pine-knot beside it, and 
which it much resembles, at this particular mo- 
ment, for a swift flight ; there is a puff of white 
smoke, and another trophy has been acquired to 
swell the number of slaughtered birds of a single 
season to a " hundred-odd," and by a single pot- 
hunter ! This is but the outline of a tragedy that 



2IO A SNUG CORNER. 

marks the incoming or outgoing of every day for 
the season — a season often inaugurated before the 
close-time has expired, and as often prolonged 
into the bleak winter days, when the feeding- 
grounds of these birds are covered with deep 
snows ; and when these half-famished woods-people 
are driven into the apple-tree tops of the orchard 
after a lunch off their brown, succulent buds. 
There is a small sense of fairness to some 
people, such is their desire for acquisition. To 
them, everything and everybody are lawful prey. 
They are a prey to themselves. It does not take 
such people a great length of time to get so 
powder-posted, so afflicted with dry-rot, that their 
neighbors can see clear through them, and esti- 
mate their exact worth to the community at large, 
as if they were weighed in a pair of Fairbanks' 
most delicately adjusted scales. The trouble with 
such people is, they cannot see themselves as they 
really are, or even as others see them. The 
human biped, without some sense of equity, some 
spark of generous manliness, is not far removed 
from a brute. I am afraid if Circe should happen 
through this world, in these modern days, that a 
larger herd of swine would follow in her train 
than that which knew her in her famous island in 
the days of Ulysses. 

From the spring into the interior of the woods, 
their floors slope downward, being the continua- 



A SNUG CORNER. 211 

tion of the water-shed of which the hill-slope below 
the barns makes the steepest part. It is not a 
great way into the swamps, with their deep quag- 
mires and treacherously snow-hidden muck-holes ; 
but the cattle never leave the solid ground for 
these quicksands of the swamps. Sometimes an 
ox or a cow is missed from the herd and is never 
found. Then it is that the solution of their disap- 
pearance is held within the treacherous silence of 
these swamps. How warmly the sun caresses 
this woody alcove, where the only hint of the 
winds that scour the upland with such fierce haste 
is the noiselessly falling snow-crystals that sail 
slowly down from the upper heights of the brill- 
iant sunlighted air, or the creaking of some lank, 
homely body of maple-tree, that 

" Like Pisa's leaning miracle, " 

lopped over against some stalwart spruce, the top 
of which sways back and forth as the wind from 
the hills smites its black plume towering above 
the woodland levels. It is an unceasing com- 
plaint, this monody of rasping note ; but in the 
woods, on a windy day, it is a sound that one hears 
all about his pathway. But what the trees were 
trying to tell me I could never surmise ; and if you 
have tried the experiment for yourself these sounds 
are very hard to locate. One tree will have a 
series of notes, a gamut of its own ; another will 



212 A SNUG CORNER. 

have a single note, but so delicately shaded is this 
note or tone with sharps and flats, with half-tones 
and tones, and suggestions of the same tone, that 
you are uncertain whether it is one tree or another. 
It is a lonesome sort of speech on a winter day, 
for there is a suggestion of chill in its impoverish- 
ment and lack of tone-quality ; but, for all that, it 
lends some semblance of sound to the otherwise 
deep silence of the forest. One sees scores of 
birds here on winter days, but they rarely speak or 
sing. As friendly as they are, and grotesque as is 
their behavior, they are as silent as the drowsy 
woods about them, unless the black-cap titmouse, 
with his undertone of 

" Cheweek-a-dee-dee-dee, cheweek-a-dee-dee-dee," 

as Samuels translates it, lends his sweet voice to 
break the monotony of the soughing wind-music 
as it drones its way through the barren tops of 
the trees. But are the trees ever barren ? Beecher 
gives expression to a beautiful thought when he 
speaks of them as the "living trees." He says, 
" Leaves die, but trees do not. They only undress. 
Leafless as they are, they are hardly barren." 



A SNUG CORNER. 213 



III. 

In this snug corner of the woods I find the 
same tree-family as ever inhabit the wet places, 
with one or two additions ; and their stout, shapely 
trunks, sharply drawn against the snow, make 
exquisite pictures in black and white. Only the 
canoe-birch is noticeably absent ; but its cousin is 
here, in garb of shimmering yellow, and in abun- 
dance. Through the gap in the pines at my right 
I catch a glimpse of the snow-white body of a 
canoe-birch ; but it is the only one in sight, and its 
lower trunk is scarred and covered with brown 
patches where the boys have torn away its white 
bark for numerous buckets for their berries, or, 
more like, their garnering of beech-nuts, or for a 
drink out of this boiling outlet of a single water- 
artery of the hill-side. I have on many a hot 
summer day borrowed a bucket or drinking-cup 
of this tree myself, and never without a spirit of 
thankfulness, as I have tasted the ineffable flavor 
of its enchantments, the royal quality of its hospi- 
tality. The canoe-birch is the courtier among 
trees, in its dress, in its daintiness, and its gener- 
osity. It has ever seemed to me the favorite of 
the woodland deity. 



214 A SNUG CORNER. 

The new trees are those of the ash family, and 
within the radius of less than a hundred feet I 
find all three of the species, the red, white, and 
black, the latter of which is indeed one of the 
treasures of the woods, for it is the basket-maker's 
tree. It is a shapely body, this tall, upright black 
ash, with its clean, well clad limbs in winter, with 
snug-fitting rind, and its close-knit foliage of pin- 
nate leaves in summer, richly dyed with deepest 
purple just before the fall rains come to rake them 
from their stout twigs. It is the cooper's tree, as 
it is the basket-maker's, and even here in its low- 
land home it is not plenty. The finding of a 
shapely black-ash trunk, like the finding of a hog- 
yoke, is a prize, and is to be marked or located 
wherever found. The bark of the ash is the 
natural home of the lichen, and along the south- 
erly side of this one I find some beautiful speci- 
mens. Here are large shields of a bright yellow 
color, with a texture as soft as velvet, and some 
smaller ones, tinted with hints of scarlet, with 
light blue, and a rare drab that reminds one of 
summer clouds. 

There are charming as well as familiar pictures 
in these lichen-bound albums of ash-bark. Within 
this disk of olive-green clinging to the rough 
coat of this friend of the cooper and basket- 
maker, I see a narrow highway, stretching out to 
northward from a gauntlet of tall pines, a rib- 



A SNUG CORNER. 215 

bon of white unwinding from somewhere beyond 
the Rattlesnake Hills, reaching out between the 
orchards, and up past an old, yellow farm-house, 
with its lofty " sweep " overtopping its story -and- 
a-half gable. Along both sides of this dusty rib- 
bon of a country road are hedges of mammoth 
alders, as lean and gaunt and scrawny, in their 
rinds of blackish green, as they well can be, with 
hosts of kalmias, of high-bush blueberry, and tan- 
gle of blackberry and raspberry vines, that almost 
hide from the sight of the wayfarer the ancient, 
moss-covered, and tumble-down wall that keeps 
this more ancient highway decrepit company. 

A tall sugar-maple stands beside this old wall, 
in the opening; and just above it, on the opposite 
side, in the orchard, there is a gap in the like an- 
cient board fence, and here in this gap is a black, 
weather-stained building, with huge square-topped 
chimney surmounting its low, one-story roof, and 
within its deep shadows below is a fireplace and 
a wide stone hearth that fills the width of the 
gable. I put my ear to the crinkly lichen, and I 
hear the crackle of the red-oak shavings burning 
briskly in their iron "jack," hedged round with 
its cordon of hooped oaken staves. I see the red 
flame leaping from this huge chimney, and smell 
the pungent smoke of burning oak ; and what a 
savory perfume it is ! This, is one of boyhood's 
winter homes of Romance, this old cooper-shop 



2l6 A SNUG CORNER. 

by the wayside. Now, the silence of the snow is 
round about it, and I catch the sound of the men 
at work with their keen draw-shaves, stripping 
the deep, amber-colored shavings from the un- 
seasoned, newly riven red-oak staves fresh from 
the woods and full of frost. How full of sound 
the bark of this black ash is ! I hear the creak- 
ing of the windlass, as its stout chain tightens 
about the stiff shook. I hear the rattle of the 
solid hoops the coopers throw over its top, and 
upon which, with brawny arms and swift strokes, 
they beat the " Cooper's March " — 

" Ra-ta, ra-ta, ra-ta-ta-ta-ta, ra-ta," 

driving them down, down closer, closer still, 
bringing and binding the staves into the compact 
shape and more perfect resemblance of the hogs- 
head that is to bring to us the sweets of the 
tropic cane-fields. 

" Ra-ta, ra-ta, ra-ta-ta-ta-ta," 

and the shook is " set up " with maul and whistle 
and song, ready to be rolled to the big fireplace, 
with its stucco lining from the clay-beds in the 
meadows. How the fires roar within the hollow 
circles of oak, snapping betimes like a handful of 
Chinese crackers ! There are no summer songs 
of this old shop in this music of the ash, unless 
of swallows' twitterings under its dusky eaves, 



A SNUG CORNER. 217 

or of robins nesting within its shadows, along a 
single one of its clumsy beams, or of pewee com- 
plaining from its low-set gable, while the wind 
plays a soft accompaniment through the countless 
cracks in its ancient boarding, and the air is filled 
with drifting blossoms or hints of abundant fruit- 
age, or when the clouds drift down across the or- 
chard-tops, to leave them dripping wet, to trip 
on, on, all day long, and through the night, with 
pattering feet, up one side and down the other of 
its low, black roof, to make the pastoral of the 
rain. 

This making of the hogshead is the most charm- 
ing of the winter idyls by the wayside, for amid its 
dancing lights and shadows lies much of homely 
thrift and homely enjoyment. The staves, "set 
up " with maul and hoop, are taken to the fire, 
and wheeled over the blazing " jack," and the fire 
burns on and on until its inner surface is charred, 
and the fibres of its oaken body are scorched and 
stiffened beyond relaxation, by its ordeal of heat. 
" Chamfered and trimmed," the shook is "knocked 
down " to be packed into a compact bundle, when 
it is the work of a moment with the sharp adze to 
deftly trim the ends of the black-ash "binder," 
whip it about the odorous shook and cut the notches 
that interlock with a firm grip, and thus the cooper's 
handiwork is ready for the market. Making shook 
in those times was a species of knitting-work for 



2l8 A SNUG CORNER. 

the men on the farm who had the good-fortune to 
know something of the trade ; and there were no 
labor unions in those days, no strikes or lock-outs. 
It always began with the nightfall of the short 
winter afternoons, after the lumbermen had come 
out of the woods lor the day, and the evening's 
work was over at nine o'clock. The old cooper- 
shop of those days, with its low-studded walls and 
sloping rafters, smoke-begrimed and rain-stained, 
and its paraphernalia of the shook-maker, was a 
neighborhood resort of a winter evening, a rare 
place for story-telling and rustic joking, in which 
vulgarity had small place, for its presiding genius 
was a gray-haired, kindly hearted man, in whose 
old one-horse shay of the thorough-brace pattern, I 
had taken many a part-way ride to school and 
home again, and whose good wife is remembered 
more by reason of her penchant for cats, which 
was something remarkable, than for anything else 
that I can remember. Hardly less than a score 
of cats might be counted about the premises at 
any time. It was a queer liking, and an unac- 
countable one, as it was old-fashioned. This an- 
cient yellow house, dull-colored and grim with 
neglect, was known among the children as " Cat's 
Paradise ; " and it was not misnamed. 

A single cedar, with hosts of brownish drab 
ribbon-ends hanging from trunk and limb, dips 
its scrawny roots of rich sienna color into these 



A SNUG CORNER. 219 

sparkling waters, lending their color to the tiny 
stream ; but it must be of an odd turn to live 
so much among strangers, for this is the only one 
of the cedar family to be found in these woods. 
Cedars are as scarce here as white crows, almost, 
though I have in mind a well authenticated in- 
stance of a white crow being seen some years ago 
on one of these upland farms. Doubtless, the 
soil conditions are not favorable, else this emi- 
grant would be sending for his relatives to come 
and keep him company. There are freaks in Nat- 
ure here as elsewhere, and this lone cedar-tree is 
one of them. How it came here, unless trans- 
planted by some boyish hand, I do not know ; but 
its smell is aromatic and refreshing enough in its 
pungency. One side of the tree is polished 
smooth where the cattle have rubbed their necks 
and shoulders up and down, after their habit when 
they wish to be curried. 

The horse has gone to the barn long ago, with 
the halter securely tied about his neck ; but the 
cattle are still nosing about in the snow, and 
browsing off the deep-colored twigs of the yellow 
birches, or are chewing their cuds with slow com- 
placence. While I wait for the calves to get their 
fill at the spring, I find myself reading the morn- 
ing news in the snow. Hosts of society items 
are written out upon the snowy sheet that lies 
open at my feet. Here is a single line reaching 



220 A SNUG CORNER. 

out from the foot of this tall pine, and here are 
sprinklings of pine-cone chips and reddish cone- 
dust. It is a kind of type used by the common 
red squirrel, who leads a more secluded life in 
winter than in summer. The decayed top or 
hollow trunk of some hard-wood tree, such as 
the maple, the birch, or the oak, where he keeps 
his winter stores, is his favorite dwelling-place. 
Though the red squirrel comes out of his house 
on winter days, it is a rare thing to see one, and 
more rare to hear his shrill, taunting whistle when 
you cannot but think he is poking all sorts of fun 
at you, jerking his bushy tail at every cachinnation. 
I expect the squirrel thinks boys terribly dull and 
pokey because they do not race around the tree- 
tops like himself. He is a knowing fellow, for he 
keeps well out of sight, for the owls, like all 
expert telegraphers, read by sound as well as 
by sight, and they do not scruple to indulge 
their always whetted appetites upon good occa- 
sion. 

It is evident that many of the woods-people are 
abroad this morning, for the tracks of these four- 
footed snow-shoers cross and intercross in every 
direction, like so many telephone-wires, and each 
carries its own message. Here is the message 
of the gray squirrel in this chain-stitch sort of a 
track, and, if I could translate its repetition of the 
same characters, I should decipher something like 



A SNUG CORNER. 221 

this out of it, — "I have gone to neighbor S.'s 
barn after a nubbin of corn." There is no telling 
when he will return, or by what route, but I sur- 
mise he will come down the old highway of his 
kind, the pasture-fence, a way which he and his 
family hold by prescription and years of adverse 
user, and that runs from the woods to the high- 
way, an unbroken, uninterrupted roadway along 
its topmost rails. He is a sly body, and makes 
the trip in safety. He moves among the high- 
ways of the tree-tops like a shadow, so noiseless 
is his step and so like them is he in his color. 
The gray squirrel is very suspicious of intruders 
into his domain. One's entrance within the shad- 
ows of his home is the signal to him to maintain 
utter silence. He is not only quiet, but he is 
absolutely motionless. A score of these wood- 
land acrobats may be about you, but, until they 
begin their travels from tree to tree, you may not 
discover them, for their color is so nearly akin to 
that of the bark of the maple, beech, or oak that 
our gray-coated friend is almost indistinguishable 
against the background upon which his living por- 
trait is painted, and his footstep is as noiseless 
as the sleepy winds of summer. It is only the 
tip of his fluffy, gray tail, blown up from the top 
of the limb, that betrays him, but that is enough 
to the sharp-eyed boy, whose instinct tells him 
much that goes on behind him as well as before. 



222 A SNUG CORNER. 

The true woodsman makes his ears serve as eyes, 
and very good eyes they are. 

Sit down upon some moss-covered log, or 
against some small tree, a sapling maple for 
instance, only let it be something behind which 
you may look without too much trouble, and keep 
perfectly still. You will not have to wait long, 
and you will catch the indefinable speech of softly 
swaying limbs above or behind you. Wait a 
moment : there it is again ; the rhythm of lightly 
bending sprays of hemlock. Look quickly up and 
you will see the self-same squirrel that was hiding 
a moment before, making his way through the 
hemlock-tops, with here and there a running leap, 
with tail spread out to its fullest width behind for 
a rudder. Keep still a bit longer. You will have 
ample chance to watch the antics of a half-score 
more of these beautiful creatures. The gray 
squirrel is out all winter long, only he changes 
his house when the snow comes. This winter he 
is snugly domiciled in yonder maple, the body of 
which runs up to such a height without a limb. 
The snow about its base is spattered with bits of 
bark from the running up and down of its dweller. 
When the buds on the tips of the beech-twigs 
begin to burst open, the gray squirrel goes house- 
hunting, and if, perchance, he finds an old crow's 
nest that suits his liking, he preempts at once, 
and moves his chattels and himself to this sum- 



A SNUG CORNER. 223 

mer residence, as it were, without further ado. 
Mrs. Squirrel must appreciate this method of 
" spring cleaning," for they rarely return to the 
old quarters with returning winter, but select 
some new hibernacle, from which they sally forth 
to visit the barns and corn-cribs, the whereabouts 
of all which they well know. I have noticed the 
gray squirrels do not seem to be so shy in winter 
as in summer, for they were more noticeable 
about the old farm-house in the snow-bound sea- 
son of the year than in warmer weather. This 
may be the result of hunger, but it is a trait as 
common to the winter birds of New England as 
it is to the gray squirrel. 

From the depths of a thick-foliaged fir-tree runs 
a beautiful footprint, reminding one of a bit of out- 
line-embroidery upon a white ground of " butcher's 
linen." It is a maze of twistings and turnings, but 
it is a tell-tale track nevertheless, for only the par- 
tridge can set such an exquisite pattern. If you 
follow it a bit, you will notice where it has dis- 
appeared in the snow, leaving a sort of blur at 
the end of this line so beautifully written. If the 
bird had mounted into the air for a flight, the 
sentence would have been cut short, but here is a 
bit of punctuation that is not found in the books. 
The partridge has started upon a burrowing expe- 
dition, a subterranean journey, as it were, under 
the snow. The track is a recent one, and you 






224 A SNUG CORNER. 

need not be surprised if this snow-tunnel builder 
burst from his retreat right under your nose, scat- 
tering the snow-crystals right and left in his hasty 
flight. Partridges have a winter habit of burrow- 
ing in the snow for long distances, but it is as 
likely to prove a prison as a shelter, for, with the 
milder changes in the weather that come with mid- 
February, a slight rainfall and a single cold night 
will build a roof of crust over their heads that con- 
demns the unfortunate birds to a lingering starva- 
tion. When the cattle are driven to the spring 
in mid-afternoon, I often find the partridges " bud- 
ding" in these apple-trees or in the tops of the 
yellow birches. They rarely fly at my approach, 
or show little of the alarm that is common when 
their haunts are invaded by the sportsman in the 
later fall. Sometimes the foxes find their snow- 
burrows, and a few scattered feathers only mark 
the place where Reynard has set his winter table. 
Many a time have I hesitated to shoot this bird 
until too late, so charmed have I been with its 
wild grace and remarkable beauty. 

A bit down the stream of this spring, there is a 
faint suggestion of flight ; a vague sense of some- 
thing in motion — as if a shadow had taken tangi- 
ble shape and life — is impressed on my mind. I 
whistle involuntarily, and, looking sharply, I catch 
a glimpse of two bright eyes set in an oval-shaped 
head that is surmounted by a pair of very long, 



A SNUG CORNER. 225 

erect ears, and all so nearly the color of the sur- 
rounding landscape, the snow and gray wood- 
shadows, that their outlines, blurred and indis- 
tinct, are hardly distinguishable. How still the 
fellow is, and immovable upon his haunches, like 
a bit of rare sculpture ! At the slightest motion 
upon my own part, he is out of sight with a swift, 
graceful leap. Plunging through the snow, I have 
found the imprint of rabbit's feet. The common 
rabbit is one of the beautiful wood-dwellers, chang- 
ing his coat twice a year as he does. He has a 
suit of lightish brown for summer wear, and a 
dusty-miller suit for winter. He needs them to 
escape the predatory hawks and owls. 

A sharp whistle will halt these forest-dwellers 
for a moment at least, and oftentimes at the cost 
of their lives. There is much curiosity exhibited 
by them at the hearing of strange sounds, and the 
hunter takes advantage of this peculiar character- 
istic at every opportunity. The fox, the crow, and 
as well the hawk and the squirrel, may be tolled 
from out their hiding-places by a fair imitation of 
the speech common to their prey. A well simu- 
lated hoot of the owl in the June woods, of a morn- 
ing or of mid-afternoon, will gather the crows from 
far and near wherever the note has been carried 
by the wind ; the imitation of the squeaky voice 
of the field-mouse, will call the fox within easy 
gun-shot, or until he has snuffed alarm in the scent 



226 A SNUG CORNER. 

of the intruder, and a sibilant sound made with 
the lips will call the chickaree or chipmonk from 
his hole in the roadside wall or in the woodland 
scurf. 

The rabbit's writing on the snow is only an in- 
dentation, a sunken square made by the four hairy 
pads that serve him as feet, bunched together, 
and his footfall is almost as light as the snow that 
bears its impress, for all his strides are so long. I 
follow this track a few rods, into the thick hem- 
locks, and am startled by this Jack-in-the-Box of 
the underbrush leaping from under my shadow. I 
have not discovered him, so much like the wood- 
land color is his surtout of winter fur. Timid as 
this fellow seems to be, he appears unable to hide 
himself. He rather trusts to silence and his swift 
leap for safety. It is a suggestive signature that 
the rabbit leaves in the snow, in which one reads 
much of the shrinking, nervous fear, the tremu- 
lous alertness, that lends such charm to his every 
movement. It is a fitting object of superstition, 
if anything can be such, that the African Hoodoo 
makes out of the rabbit's paw. If I were in want 
of a fetich, I should select the swift, light-falling 
pad of this fellow as quickly as I should anything. 
I should prefer it without the mystic ceremony of 
the negro sorceress, however efficacious such in- 
cantation might make it as a charm. 

There is nothing in this sign-manual of the 



A SNUG CORNER. 227 

rabbit like what I find in the running hand in 
which another society item is written out beside 
it, and that makes straight for the open pasture 
and the hill-slopes above. Here is a track made 
by four dainty feet, which, in its outline and pecul- 
iarity, speaks of a wariness and a cunning that 
betrays the red fox at once. I had not seen it 
before, but it follows the run up to the spring 
and into the cattle-path, where it has dis- 
appeared. 

From these woods, over the uplands where the 
farm-buildings are clustered together, just a bit to 
the north, was a famous runway for the foxes ; 
and after mid-February had come, with its stout 
snow-crust, Reynard might be seen, almost any 
morning, crossing the highway into the adjoin- 
ing field or pasture, up or down, and rarely ever 
in a hurry, unless the hounds were out, which 
was not uncommon. Reynard is rare-witted, and 
skilled in field and wood craft; and, when hard- 
pressed, displays wonderful ingenuity in throwing 
his pursuers off the scent, which is always lighter 
or weaker on clear, dry days than when the air is 
charged with moisture. When the hounds are 
after him on a fresh scent, he often takes to the 
sleigh-track in the highway, as I have seen him do 
more than once, trusting, I have no doubt, to the 
fortunate passing of a team before they reach it, 
or picks his way along the walls or fences, making 



228 A SNUG CORNER. 

use of every conceivable object that may aid him 
in his effort to escape. 

Close by the margin of the woods is a thick-set 
colony of scrub-pines. Within their shadows is a 
huge outcropping of ledge, full of wide seams and 
mysterious openings. It is one of the dwelling- 
places Reynard chooses for his summer residence, 
and for the play-ground of the little Foxes, that 
are fairly well grown by mid-August. I have, in 
my boy-days, seen Mistress Fox out with her baby 
family of foxes on many an afternoon, having the 
merriest time imaginable ; and, though I was quite 
near them at times, they kept up their play appar- 
ently unmindful of my intrusion. Just at dusk, I 
hear the sharp, petulant speech of Reynard play- 
ing at hide-and-seek among the falling shadows of 
the woods, something between a bark and a whine, 
and full of querulous discontent. It is a dolorous, 
scolding voice, that echoes through the twilight 
woods ; a lonely, weird-like sound, pitched on a 
high key, like most nocturnal notes, that, when it 
dies away, leaves the silence of the summer night 
deeper and more noticeable. 

A bit to the westward is the old Plantation, a 
lonesome enough place even in the broad sun- 
light ; and here were numerous burrowing-places 
of this prowler among the farm-wife's chicken- 
coops, and from this wood-girt pasture-opening a 
chorus of rasping, discordant sounds would come 



A SNUG CORNER. 229 

up to the barn, just after sundown. Along the 
hen-roosts there was always a stir of apprehension 
among the fowls, and a drowsy cluck always 
greeted the distant hail of Reynard. This wood- 
land amphitheatre was the summer rendezvous of 
the fox tribe. It was the home of the veery and 
whippoorwill as well, whose notes were outlined 
as clearly as rain-drops in the morning sun, against 
the background of the fox's grating whine. I do 
not remember ever hearing the bark of the fox in 
the winter, or even after the snows had come, but 
it was rather an accompaniment to the spring pip- 
ing of the frogs. One of the winter pastimes 
of the fox is the hunting of field-mice. After the 
snows have been washed away by the April rains, 
if you will take a walk in the fields, you may trace 
the winter highways of these rodents through the 
" fog " or dead grass. The stubble is plainly 
marked with hosts of arched passage-ways, or 
grass-covered galleries, made by the field-mouse 
in his winter peregrinations ; and they are, some 
of them, very artistically constructed, and furnish 
excellent specimens of above-ground tunnel-build- 
ing. A trudge through the snow, of any winter 
day, will betray Reynard's search for this winter 
tidbit in the numerous excavations and holes in 
the snow-covered fields — the deer-mouse, or field- 
mouse, as it is more familiarly known. This 
fellow is one of the most beautifully marked and 



23O A SNUG CORNER. 

cleanly clad of his kind, and it is no wonder that 
the fox should regard him as a winter dainty. 

The silver-gray fox is a rare animal in the 
Maine woods. But few have ever been seen in 
the region of Sebago pond, and to the northward 
of it ; and, to my knowledge, but one has ever 
been captured in the near vicinage of my boyish 
haunts, and that was almost a half-century ago. 
If the farmer has been unfortunate enough to lose 
any of his cattle by sickness, it was 

" Pull off the hide, and give it to the crows " 

and foxes. So the carcass, hauled away into the 
pasture, and well "doctored" with strychnine, 
was given over to the poisonous baiting of the 
foxes, the skunks, and crows. In a month's time 
the bones would be picked clean by these carrion- 
eaters, but whether the mortality rates were in- 
creased among them was ever an uncertain ques- 
tion ; at least, there never seemed to be any 
diminution in the numbers of either family. Some 
years the depredations committed by the foxes 
among the farm poultry were more marked than 
in others, when whole flocks would be plucked 
of their feathers, among the pasture-ferns, in a 
single midsummer month ; other years hardly a 
fox would be seen the whole season. Of all the 
woodland-dwellers, the fox is a rover. A coward 
at heart, hunger makes him bold ; so bold that I 



A SNUG CORNER. 23 1 

have seen him dash into the barn-yard flock, to 
carry off the fattest fowl, in the hubbub created 
by his sudden onslaught. I do not think the loss 
of some dame Partlet was the cause of so much 
regret as the audacious appearance of the fox was 
surprising. 

What a lithe, limber fellow he is, loping across 
the fields, or leaping walls and fences, when urged 
by his fear of the old house-dog ; and how grace- 
fully he carries his bush behind him ! As wily as 
he is, he will blunder into the most clumsily set 
trap, as he will for weeks avoid that most adroitly 
set, for he is suspicion animate. 

But here are hosts of bird-tracks among the 
hemlocks and pines; and in the low birch-trees 
hereabouts are scores of yellowish brown birds, 
with their crowns and sides splashed with dark 
red, that very much resemble the pine-finch. 
Look carefully, and you will find it to be the 
Lesser Red-poll, a very common winter visitor in 
northern New England. From the birches the 
red-polls make frequent excursions to the tall 
weeds in the fences, the fields, and pastures, to 
feed on their seeds ; but there is, in these winter 
days, no more beautiful sight than to see a flock 
of these lively bird-folk pecking at the seeds of 
the birches and ice-bound alders in the lowlands, 
lending a rare animation to the leafless trees and 
bushes. They have a pretty habit of alighting 



232 A SNUG CORNER. 

as nearly in a bunch, upon a single limb or twig, 
as may be, to forsake it in a body, flying closely 
together, and bounding along through the avenues 
of the woods to some better feeding-ground. They 
are bush-dwellers, and construct beautiful nests of 
Nature's finest, softest material, and, though a 
somewhat silent bird in winter, they, like other 
winged people, essay a few songful notes in their 
mating-season. 

The snow-bunting is hail, fellow, well met, with 
the red-poll. Where you find the one you are 
like to find the other. They come with the harsh, 
snow-laden winds of December ; and the deeper 
the snow, the more abundant the snow-bunting. 
They are the children of the winter gales, as Mr. 
Pennant says, " driving about most in a high 
wind." They soon learn when and where the 
housewife shakes the family table-cloth, and their 
visits to the farm-house door-steps are remarkable 
for their regularity, and where they eat their fill, 
all the time keeping up a half-audible chatter, that 
has no semblance of song. They are very tame, 
and are easily approached, as are the carmine-col- 
ored pine grosbeaks. The grosbeaks feed upon 
the small buds and cone-seeds of the fir-trees that 
are abundant in this locality, as the brownish 
olive finch does upon the seeds contained in the 
fresh cones of the pines. The grosbeak is a war- 
bler, which is more than can be said of the other 



A SNUG CORNER. 233 

fellow, who sets his table amid the pitchy cones 
of the pine-trees. 

This warmest place in the woods is one of the 
favorite habitats of the New England birds. The 
white-bellied nuthatch is quite common, and takes 
the place of the downy woodpecker, as he is the 
bark-borer among the winter birds. The nut- 
hatch is boon companion to the black-cap tit- 
mouse, a bird better known to the farmer boy 
by the familiar name of chickadee. The wood- 
chopper knows him well, for, while the chips fly 
out from under the strokes of the axe, the tit- 
mouse watches every movement with a curiosity 
and concern that is amusing. He cocks his head 
sideways, looks up and down, hopping restlessly 
from twig to twig as if in great trouble that, Yan- 
kee-like, he cannot ask a few questions. He does 
his part in pantomime to perfection, saying all the 
time cheweek, cheweek, cheweek-a-dee-dee in a 
soft, clear tone, making in itself a perfect bar of 
music. I really should like to- hear what he has to 
say. He is a great grub-eater, searching fruit- 
trees as well as the trees in the woodland for his 
food, and, like the bunting, he is a back-door vis- 
itor. He has the most cheerful disposition, and 
likewise a great way of ruffling his plumage so 
that he looks twice as large as he really is. Storm 
or shine, he comes to the farm-house door every 
day, in flocks of ten to fifty and more ; and what 



234 A SNUG CORNER. 

a whirling over and over flight is theirs, as they 
scurry for the woods, in the late afternoon, with 
the sun already an hour up, when they have fin- 
ished their repast of bread-crumbs ! I have 
noticed that all winter birds are more or less so- 
ciable and inquisitive. It is a charming quality of 
companionship, and enlivens the heart of the 
woodland wayfarer to an appreciable degree, for I 
have noticed that humanity is more susceptible of 
the presence of living things in the winter woods 
than when the gray limbs are draped in the woof 
of summer, and when there is so much more of 
palpitating life and song to attract the attention, 
and so much of pleasing color and motion. 

Burroughs says the woods, in winter, are " rigid 
and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound 
like a stringed instrument." This may be true of 
certain days, but generally the deeps of snow 
seem to absorb sounds, and only peculiar tones 
are transmitted to any great distance. The 
strokes of the wood-chopper's axe, on most win- 
ter days, drop within a certain radius ground- 
ward, like the chips that fly from its keen edge. 
It is only in certain directions, along certain 
atmospheric strata, that these sound-messages 
transmit readily. On other lines the wires are 
cut or out of working order. This is true of any 
day that does not precede the immediate coming 
of a storm. The woods are so still that sounds 



A SNUG CORNER. 235 

which would ordinarily pass unnoticed, at a differ- 
ent season of the year, are not more perfect in 
their articulation, but seem to be so because such 
a multitude of other sounds are absent. I appre- 
hend that the winter air is a better transmitter of 
sound, because its wires have less work to do, for 
I have thought the frost might have transformed 
the trees into storage batteries, and set them in 
fuller sympathy with the countless operators that 
handle Nature's instruments, now, if ever, in a 
supersensitive condition. It always seemed to 
me, however, for all the phenomena of sound-car- 
rying quality, that the winter air was so blocked 
with snow-drifts that the sound was actually em- 
bargoed, and waiting for April to break out its 
roads. 

The woods have nothing of harshness, nothing 
of hard tense character and rigidity, through the 
winter days, to myself. They are the rather soft 
and appealing in their influences, like immense 
draperies loosely woven and full of graceful folds. 
They are the sleeping-places of the Winds. It is 
only the bleak, open fields that suggest the iron 
hand of a Master. The rare beauty of a winter 
month, by day or night, is its immaculate purity, 
but it is as far from the cold beauty of the sculp- 
tor's ideal in marble as the sky is above the earth 
from which the marble was quarried. This blend- 
ing of the leafless branches of the trees against 



236 A SNUG CORNER. 

the sky is the " effect " that all ambitious artists 
seek after. It is one of Nature's truths in land- 
scape mosaic. What a soft, pearly " effect " it is, 
and how hard to catch its approximate in value 
and fasten it upon the canvas ! It is humanity 
striving after an impossibility. 

How tall the bare trees hereabouts seem, and 
how dumpy the evergreens beside them ! The air 
holds a superior quality of alertness, giving one a 
keener eyesight and making the ear more sen- 
sitive to outward vibration. The tympanum is 
keyed closer to the auditory nerve, the wire that 
carries the sound message to the brain. I discern 
the musical quality in sounds with greater ease 
and accuracy. In these days, the 

" Cheweek-a-dee-dee-dee, cheweek-a-dee-dee-dee," 

of the titmouse is more like a song than at any 
other time of the year. No matter how weakly 
pitched this note may be, or how light its timbre, 
the imagination supplies all lack, so much does 
the Soul crave a bird-song in these gray, songless 
days. So, out of the paltry, faltering notes of this 
winter resident of the woods, the heart makes a 
song of its own. In winter, one's predisposition 
controls his outlook. Happiness is in some sense 
a plant rooted in the heart, its fruitage depending 
somewhat upon the attention that is bestowed 
upon its cultivation. It is a quality born of one's 



A SNUG CORNER. 237 

own resources, rather than a direct importation 
into one's experiences. People make a mistake 
when they go away from home to find it or to 
purchase it, for the search for anything so elusive 
cannot be other than disappointing. So one finds 
in the winter woods whatever his heart bespeaks 
of disagreeable chill or robust, enlivening anima- 
tion. The bare woods hedged about with deep 
snows make a kaleidoscopic picture that rarely 
looks the same to different individuals. Winter 
has the quality of bare strength and none of the en- 
ervating voluptuousness of summer. For flowers 
winter gives snow-flakes, and for perfumed winds 
gives driving snow-storms and bitter, freezing air. 
His coldest breath is a nectar that is more exhila- 
rating than the dewy morning of June. What 
tightening of the body-tendons, what replenishing 
of the nerve-batteries that feed the brain, comes 
with these white-clad days of winter. 

All the birds I have named are here in this 
snug corner of the woods, flitting from limb to 
limb or making tiny tracks in the snow, and 
watching me with the brightest of bird-eyes. 
They are rare company, and I am loth to leave 
them ; but the cattle are already half-way up the 
steep hill to the barn, and I stumble up the narrow 
path after them. This is but a single jewel from 
Nature's winter necklace of brilliants, but not the 
least in interest or value. One sees much who 



238 A SNUG CORNER. 

tries to see at all, and in this brief sketch the 
story is hardly begun. There is so much to tell 
about, one hardly knows where to begin his reci- 
tation of Nature's lessons. Nature teaches the 
science of economy to perfection, and he is a poor 
scholar indeed who does not learn something from 
her every day, for the man whose thoughts are 
not aroused by what Nature shows him from day 
to day has what one might call thought-inertia. 
Her text-books are all illustrated with the rarest 
of wood-cuts, etchings, and colors. She is the 
original object-lesson, teacher, setting her tasks, 
from the easiest to the most difficult, in the snow, 
the swaying limbs of the trees, and in the sky as 
well as fields. One who does not know Nature's 
alphabet knows but little that is truly good, and 
is a great way from what God made him to be. 
There is but little humanity where there is little 
or no love for, or appreciation of Nature. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 



LD roads are ever delightful company, but 
one is far from saying as much of a new 
highway, with its upturned, uneven sur- 
face, awkward enough to ride upon or walk over, 
at best, with hardly a stray weed to intrude upon 
its monotony of garish freshness of earthy colors, 
while along its ditches, that lend it sharpness and 
angularity of feature, are thrown out huge dirt- 
stained bowlders, tinged with brilliant ochres, and 
that have not yet been elevated to the moss-deco- 
rated peerage of the wayside, by the Rain. A 
newly constructed road in the country is like a 
new acquaintance whose attitude and ways are 
constrained and uncomfortable, and whose per- 
sonal attractions lack the simple guaranty of like- 
ableness. 

This is more noticeable where the road surveyor 
has ploughed his vandal furrow through the wood- 
land and lined it with dead tree-tops and up- 
turned stumps, with their black, knotted roots 
reaching out toward the traveller in a forlorn, 
hopeless sort of a way. What ragged gaps the 

241 V 



242 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

road-builder has left in the living tree-tops, that 
look as if their wood-toilets had been suddenly 
interrupted, as, no doubt, they were, when the 
choppers came with their keen blades of steel, 
their relays of stout oxen with stump-pulling 
machines and ploughs, and all the paraphernalia 
of the rustic road-maker I It is here I have 
caught Nature en deshabille for once. But all 
roads were new once, growing wider and better, 
and more friendly and sociable, more safe and 
convenient, as the thorough-brace wagon super- 
seded the horse and saddle-bags, as the Brewster 
side-bar has displaced the once aristocratic thor- 
ough-brace with its rugged, jolting discomfort. 
If our ancestors were never afflicted with that 
modern iconoclast of happiness, dyspepsia, there 
is good reason for it ; for riding in the pioneer 
days was as productive of physical exhaustion and 
muscular irritation as came by walking, and I 
have no doubt, after all, the latter was the more 
preferable. 

An old country-road is like a tree : it is one of 
the things that grow out-of-doors. It is never 
done growing, and, let well alone for a decade, it 
has outgrown everything and everybody but the 
cattle-folk. The bushes will have clasped hands 
across its faded-out, grass-choked ruts ; and the red 
clover, the tall buttercup, the yellow-hearted 
daisy, and the vagrant fire-weed flaunt their 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 243 

brightness in one's face as he wades through 
its deeps of fresh, harmonious color. Nature is 
a jealous mother, and resents these interferences 
and innovations of men with undisguised feeling ; 
but there is a rare, sweet fellowship between 
these white lines of dirt, these human ear-marks 
along the face of the earth, and the springing 
grasses, the low tops of their luxuriant alders and 
net-work of birches, their tree-sheltered barriers 
of pasture-wall and sprawling rail fence and 
woodland shadow, the singing stream that flows 
under their bridges, and the winds that blow the 
snows from their ledgy thresholds on the hill-tops, 
or pile their wandering steps through the valleys 
full of unyielding drifts. There is a rare compan 
ionship, as well, between them and the wandering 
footstep that leaves its imprint among their lights 
and shadows. Many a time, as I have been 
mounting a bit of rise in the highway, I have 
fallen to watching the slow-creeping pace of the 
stake and rail fence as it went up the hill beside 
me. How long stretched out and tired it seemed, 
dragging its slow length to the topmost crest, and, 
once there, how it raced down the other side with 
me, as if to show me it was not the slow, pokey 
thing I took it to be. Ah, there is a communion 
to be held with these deaf-mutes of Nature, after 
all ! If you don't believe it, just run a race down 
some hilly highway, with the fence within reach of 



244 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

your long whip, and all the wayside bushes nod- 
ding their heads and clapping their hands and 
catching at your carriage-wheels the whole way, 
as if to clog your pace to let the fence get ahead 
of you, as it invariably does. 

An ancient high-road comes to mind, and I see 
beside it 

" A homestead among the farms, 
And a woman with bare arms 

Drawing water from a well ; 
As the bucket mounts apace, 
With it mounts her own fair face 

As at some magician's spell." 

How brilliantly white this old road is, so long bur- 
nished in the sun! How refreshing the bloom 
that hedges it in with dark-leaved orchards on 
either side, with their soft, suggestive pictures, 
wandering up over the hills into the mid-day sun- 
light, and down the sides of the valleys into their 
cooling shade, sweet with the perfume of the 
woodlands and noisy with the singing, jubilant 
music of the brooks. 

The old house sits well down in the hollow of 
the fields, making a pretty picture with its clus- 
tered, rambling, sleepy roofs, while overlooking 
them are the sun-blackened gables of the barns, 
with troops of swallows to keep them summer 
company. This country dwelling is painted white, 
and, with its dark green blinds,, it is perfect in its 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 245 

suggestion of country comfort and thrift. Doors 
and windows are thrown wide-open to the sun and 
wind. A part of the ell is protected by low 
shed-roof, under which is the long well-room, and 
beside the door opening into this coolest place 
about the house in midsummer is the huge red 
cheese-tub set out to dry, and over its rim is 
thrown the amber-colored cheese-cloth. A long 
row of glistening milk-pans keeps them company, 
and across their glimmering line of light leans the 
slender shadow of the crooked clothes-pole, black 
and homely enough, but that is full of golden 
speech and suggestion. Within the shadow of 
the wide-thrown doors of the woodshed, in its 
coolest corner, under the rickety stairs that lead 
by an easy flight to the corn-chamber, — and a 
famous old chamber it was, — stands the mouldy 
open cheese-press, which had a great fascination 
for me ; and I have a faint idea if some one 
should in after years remove this old press from 
its deep shadow under the stairs, there might be 
found many a rusty hint and relic of " whittling 
days," for hereabouts has disappeared many a 
youthful treasure, or, in other words, many a jack- 
knife. I hear the creaking of its long, wooden 
arm as the housewife piles stone after stone into 
the basket that hangs by a stout chain from its 
outer end. What rills of appetizing whey trickle 
down the side of its broad, open hoop as the 



246 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

wooden lever bears harder upon its fulcrum of 
fresh curd, and what a tinkling song it sings at 
first, to lose that song, only too soon, in a slow 
drip-drip, as the curd is squeezed drier and more 
dry in this making of the cheese ! 

Down the slope that flanks the door of the 
house, a hoodless but quaint specimen of car- 
pentry in these days, a rounded dome of rifted 
fire-wood stretches itself, thistle-girt, toward the 
road ; and beyond this helter-skelter woodpile is 
the ancient half-wall that runs up to the bee-hives, 
that lie in the shadow of the pomegranate-trees, 
where the toilers among the field-blossoms live. 
What suggestions of homely comfort, of open, 
ruddy fireplaces and leaping flame — of farmer's 
cheer and generous hospitality ! what springs of 
summer sunshine are here, and what pent-up 
woodland song! This woodpile is the summer 
residence of a large and increasing Chickaree 
family. It is to them a house of wood, in truth, 
cool and dry ; and many a sharp whistle of inquiry or 
alarm greets the farmer's buxom wife, as she comes 
hither to gather the sun-dried chips in her broad 
apron, for the kindling of her kitchen fires. The 
robins perch every morning upon the topmost 
peak of the chickaree's home, to tell the already 
stirring chickarees that the sun is up ; and who, 
once awake, play at hide-and-seek with the house- 
cat all day long. Within the lights and shifting 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 247 

shadows of this heaped-up woodpile, the evidence 
of rustic husbandry, is hid the romance of a 
summer day at the pleasantest of inland farms, 
and the rarer dream of long, fire-lighted winter 
nights by the farm-house hearth-stone. 

Just around the corner of the prim front-yard, 
with its likewise prim picket-fence, painted spot- 
less white, its green drapery of luxuriant wood- 
bine, and hedge of damask roses, the petals of 
which strew the grass with hints of rare, delicate 
color, is the narrow cow-lane, with its barrier of 
three slender bars ; and between the tall hemlock 
posts, the narrow gate adjoining, that is always 
held in place by its wooden pin, and that opens 
into the roadside with a quick, uneven lurch, like 
that of a drunken man ; and just beyond, north- 
ward, is the aged watering-shed, built long before 
I can remember, beside the pasture-wall ; and 
where the cattle came at mid-afternoon to drink 
and loaf, as only cattle can, on long summer days. 

The roadside is pink with the daintily tufted 
blossoms of that pest of the farm, the Corn or 
Canada Thistle. The tall, slender stalks, guarded 
by countless bristling spines, that are not less 
capable of inflicting a painful wound because they 
are so insignificantly small, tower above all others 
of the weed-family, and stand alone by themselves. 
The thistle is the tramp of field and wayside, the 
vagrant of hay-mow and cattle-crib, and the 



248 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

scourge of garden-patch ; it is the bane of what- 
ever of decent vegetable company it gets into ; 
its shadow is the upas-taint of the farm ; without 
a single redeeming quality, it is abhorred and 
anathematized by booted farmer and barefooted 
boy alike. What festerings and burnings come 
with the prick of its tiny, almost invisible needle, 
as much to be dreaded almost as the sting of a 
bee ! Once under the surface of the cuticle, its 
microscopic lance eludes all search ; and with a 
pain that, slight as it is, is indescribably provok- 
ing, as if it were telling you, with every bite and 
stinging itch, — "Find me if you can," — at its 
game of hide-and-seek among the shrinking, quiv- 
ering nerves. When its bloom has faded out 
under the amorous heats of midsummer, and its 
seeds have ripened, the transformation has taken 
place ; and this glowing, sweetly scented weed- 
flower is a mass of downy, milk-white, winged 
seeds that, held within a calyx beautifully clad in 
a green armor of lozenge-shaped scales, look like 
a bunch of floss, with the upright end squarely 
trimmed, or, rather, like a silken-tipped pompon. 

These seeds of the thistle are of ethereal light- 
ness, and the summer winds sow them with boun- 
tiful hand here, there, and everywhere ; over the 
mowing-fields, by the roadside, under the hedges, 
through the pastures, and over the topmost spires 
of the woods, flying as the birds do, and alighting 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 249 

only when the winds have tired of them. This 
seed is one of Nature's wonders, with thousands 
of other seeds lying dormant within its glistening 
ovule ; sailing over the widest ponds, and climbing 
the highest mountains, and keeping fellowship 
with the clouds, for all I know. One might justly 
think these winged weed-seeds would never stop 
in their airy flight, but, sown somewhere, another 
year they peep from the brown earth, and, coaxed 
alternately by sun and rain, they soon overtop 
their slower neighbors, to fade away again with 
another midsummer, to again sow the farm-lands 
and by-ways with the germs of a newer generation 
of baleful weeds, as countless in numbers as the 
sands of the sea-shore. The thistle may do for the 
Scotsman's guerdon, but the New England farmer 
banishes it, pink blossoms, sweet perfume, poetry, 
and all, to the merciless scythe and hoe, as the 
Scotsman would, did he have to wring his sub- 
stance from a New England soil, which is of no 
mean quality, rugged as it is. 

Here are thistle-birds by the score, flying over 
the tops of this huge bed of thistles, not a whit 
more yellow than the yellow butterflies that alight 
here and there among the pink bloom that over- 
tops the low wall, the runway for all the striped 
squirrels or chickarees in this immediate region ; 
and, as well, the holing-place for more than one 
woodchuck family, as the yellow house-dog would 



25O A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

tell you, could you translate his bark of exaspera- 
tion, half smothered as it is in the dirt that marks 
his unavailing effort to dig "Chucky" from his 
hiding under the great half-buried stones. I can 
hear the swift, angry chattering of the woodchuck 
as the dog gets nearer his victim, the prolonged, 
angrier growl of the dog as the game nears the 
end ; a moment of silence, and then a fierce com- 
motion in the bushes, as if something was getting 
the liveliest sort of a shaking, intermixed with 
growlings and chatterings ; but it is only for a 
moment, and the unequal combat is ended, and 
Towser trots out into the road, with the limp, 
lifeless woodchuck in his mouth, to drop his prize 
at my feet, a single episode of a summer day. 

The yellow, or, to be more ornithologically 
exact, the thistle-bird, makes his summer habitat 
here in northern New England, among the scrub 
apple-trees and witch-hazels, — the hamamelis of 
the drug-vender, — by the roadside, building his 
nest, which is beautifully woven out of the snow- 
white shreds of bark gleaned from the neighbor- 
ing birches, lining it with the softest of mosses 
from the pines in the adjoining swamp. Why 
these rivals of the canary, in color and shape, 
should be afflicted with such an ill-omened, ple- 
beian name, I never could surmise, for this way- 
side dweller is a beauty, lissome and dainty in his 
get-up, of fine plumage, and possessed of a pleas- 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 25 I 

ing song, a low-voiced warble, not unlike, in some 
respects, the less ambitious notes of his imported 
Dromio, the singer of the Hartz Mountains. This 
fellow, hopping along the fences or along the top 
stones of the stone walls or along its top-rails, is 
excellent company. Sometimes he is whimsical, 
and prefers the slender, topmost twigs of the 
bushes, flying from one to the other, as if it were 
a matter of supreme delight to teter down and up, 
if only for a brief moment, on the cone-shaped 
minarets of the pink and white blossoms of the 
hardhack bushes ; and what a picture of light- 
some grace and color he makes against the back- 
ground of June ! I have noticed that some of our 
bird neighbors show a positive liking for human- 
ity, as others exhibit a marked avoidance. I do 
not think this aversion to humanity arises from 
fear of harm, but rather because some of the 
feathered family are in some sort of the "hail, 
fellow, well met " disposition, while others are 
more exclusive and aristocratic in the choice of 
their associates, a choice sometimes more nice 
than wise. 

Some people seem to get on with the birds 
better than others. There may be something of 
instinct in that. The thrush family prefer the 
lowlands and deep woodland shadows, unless it 
may be the red thrush, that one sees so much by 
the roadside, where there are plenty of vagrant 



252 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

pines in which they may hide ; and even the or- 
chard-dweller, the noisy, red-breasted robin, has 
something of this trait of shyness that one cannot 
fail to notice in every movement of his cousin, 
who builds his red-thrush nest within the shadows 
of the roadside pines. As deep brownish red as is 
the plumage of this feathered fellow who makes 
the pines his habitat, while robin lives across the 
road in the orchard, his flight through the sunlit 
atmosphere is a revelation. It is, in its way, almost 
as brilliant as the flight of the oriole, only more 
fiery ; but in its swiftness like a missile propelled 
by some extraordinary force. It is more a sug- 
gestion of hot color than anything else that occurs 
to my mind, for it is a well trained eye that is able 
to follow this bird's silent going and coming among 
the trees, for he is rarely without their shelter. 
Better known as the brown thrasher, he is one of 
the great favorites about the farm, not only for 
the company and delightful song he affords, but 
for the industry he exhibits in the farmer's be- 
half, in garden and orchard. It is about the 
middle of May that one hears the thrasher's song, 
known in some localities as the song of the Brown 
Mocker, that is so hard to describe and so delight- 
ful to listen to, in the early spring morning, and 
which Samuels sums up as a " confused mixture 
of the notes of different birds, or rather seems to 
be." You will find its nest, if you are fortunate 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 253 

enough to discover it, on the ground, among the 
thick grasses, and, most like, under the shelter of 
a clump of bushes, or even higher up in a thicket 
or tangle of vines and briers, and sometimes, but 
not often, it is a bush-dweller, building high up 
among the limbs and branches of thorn or other 
dwarf grower, in the openings of pasture along 
the edges of the woods. Wilson's description of 
this bird and its ways is so interesting that it is 
not out of place here. He says, — " It is the 
largest of all our Thrushes, and is a well known 
and very distinguished songster. About the mid- 
dle or 20th of April, or generally about the time 
the cherry-trees begin to blossom, he arrives in 
Pennsylvania ; and from the tops of our hedge- 
rows, sassafras, apple or cherry-trees, he salutes 
the opening morning with his charming song, 
which is loud, emphatical, and full of variety. At 
that serene hour, you may plainly distinguish his 
voice fully a half a mile off. These notes are not 
imitative, as his name would seem to import, and 
as some people believe, but seem wholly his own, 
and have considerable resemblance to the notes of 
the Song Thrush (Turdus Masicus) of Great Brit- 
ain. Early in May he builds his nest, choosing a 
thorn-bush, low cedar, thicket of briers, dog-wood 
sapling, or cluster of vines, for its situation, gen- 
erally within a few feet of the ground. Outwardly 
it is constructed of small sticks ; then layers of 



254 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

dry leaves ; and lastly, lined with fine, fibrous 
roots, but without any plaster. The eggs are 
five, thickly sprinkled with ferruginous grains, on 
a very pale bluish ground. They generally have 
two broods in a season. Like all birds that build 
near the ground, he shows great anxiety for the 
safety of his nest and young, and often attacks 
the black snake in their defence ; generally, too, 
with success, his strength being greater, and his 
bill stronger and more powerful than any other of 
his tribe within the United States. His food 
consists of worms, which he scratches from the 
ground, caterpillars, and many kinds of insects. 
Beetles, and the whole race of coleopterous in- 
sects, wherever he can meet with them, are sure 
to suffer. He is accused, by some people, of 
scratching up the hills of Indian corn in planting- 
time. This may be partly true ; but for every 
grain he pilfers, I am persuaded, he destroys five 
hundred insects, particularly a large, dirty-colored 
grub, with a black head, which is more pernicious 
to the corn and other grain and vegetables than 
nine-tenths of the whole feathered race. He is 
an active, vigorous bird, flies generally low, from 
one thicket to another, with his long, broad tail 
spread out like a fan, is often seen about brier 
and bramble bushes, along fences, and has a sin- 
gle note or chuck as you approach his nest. In 
Pennsylvania they are numerous, but never fly in 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 255 

flocks. About the middle of September, or as 
soon as they have well recovered from their 
moulting, in which they suffer severely, they 
disappear for a season. In passing through 
the southern parts of Virginia, and south as 
far as Georgia, in the depth of winter, I have 
found them lingering in sheltered situations, par- 
ticularly on the border of swamps and rivers. 
On the first of March they were in full song 
round the commons at Savannah, as if straining to 
outstrip the mocking-bird, that prince of feathered 
musicians." 

" The Thrasher is a welcome visitant in spring 
to every lover of rural scenery and rural song. In 
the months of April and May, when our woods, 
hedge-rows, orchards, and cherry-trees are one 
profusion of blossoms ; when every object around 
conveys the sweet sensations of joy, and Heaven's 
abundance is, as it were, showering around us, 
the grateful heart beats in unison with the varying 
elevated strains of this excellent bird ; we listen 
to its notes with a kind of devotional ecstasy, as a 
morning hymn to the great and most adorable 
Creator of all. The human being who, amidst 
such scenes, and in such seasons of rural serenity 
and delight, can pass them with cold indifference, 
and even contempt, I sincerely pity ; for abject 
must that heart be, and callous those feelings, and 
depraved that taste, which neither the charms of 



256 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

nature, nor the melody of innocence, nor the voice 
of gratitude or devotion can reach." 

" Concerning the sagacity and reasoning faculty 
of this bird, my venerable friend, Mr. Bartram, 
writes me as follows : ' I remember to have reared 
one of these birds from the nest, which, when full- 
grown became very tame and docile. I frequently 
let him out of his cage, to give him a taste of 
liberty. After fluttering, and dusting himself in 
dry sand and earth, and bathing, washing, and 
dressing himself, he would proceed to hunt in- 
sects, such as beetles, crickets, and other shelly 
tribes ; but, being very fond of wasps, after catch- 
ing them and knocking them about to break their 
wings, he would lay them down, then examine if 
they had a sting, and with his bill squeeze the 
abdomen to clear it of the reservoir of poison 
before he would swallow his prey.' " 

The nest, newly built, I have never found in 
Maine woods or pastures earlier than the last of 
May. They are deeply built affairs, a combination 
of twigs and strips torn into strings, of the cedar 
or birch, and lined with combings from the tails 
of the cattle they have gleaned from here and 
there among the pasture brambles or lowland 
bushes. The largest number of eggs I have yet 
discovered in a single nest was four, which were 
something over an inch in length, ovate in form, 
with a diameter in their thickest part but little 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 257 

less than their length, in color a greenish or dusty 
white spattered with the tiniest of spots of warm 
brown. By the first of October this beautiful 
visitor is away to the South. 

Robin Red-breast is not so shy as is this swift- 
winged frequenter of the country roads ; but he 
seems always looking over his shoulder, as if he 
suspected some one was about to play a trick upon 
him. Ah, Robin, how many times when a boy 
did I try to get a pinch of salt on your tail-feath- 
ers, as if you would let me do such a foolish thing ; 
and yet I believed it possible, because an older 
person had told me I might possibly succeed. It 
was like many another boyish dream, as unreal as 
Castles in Spain. The smaller bird-folk who 
haunt the highway and door-yard elms and the 
eaves of the barns, the orioles, the sparrows, the 
thistle-birds, the swallows, the wrens, and blue- 
birds, and all those which Wilson Flagg termed 
as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard," seem 
rather to enjoy the semblance of protection which 
their proximity to humanity would guarantee in 
some sort. No doubt, they think themselves 
better out of the way of the owls and hawks, 
and they are partially right. It is only the butch- 
er-bird, the bloodthirsty shrike, that makes its 
onslaught among these feathered people in the 
latter part of the summer, impaling its booty upon 
the slender needles of the thorn bushes, two or 



258 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

three at a time, and seemingly out of a pure 
wantonness. 

The jay is a nest-despoiler, but rarely approaches 
the farm-house ; the remote fields and the shadowy 
woodlands are his hunting-grounds, as they are 
those of the broad-winged, the smaller, sharp- 
shinned, the sparrow and pigeon hawks ; but the 
crows and squirrels go bird-nesting as well, and 
the blue-winged robber finds his own nest de- 
spoiled in turn, which is one of Nature's compen- 
sations. Nature's laws are compensatory ; it is 
only in this way that she maintains her super- 
abundance of life. In other words, Nature has a 
system of book-keeping as novel as it is accurate, 
but it is always an off-set account. Debit and 
credit, as men understand the terms, mean noth- 
ing to her. Fluctuations in market values or the 
rising or falling fortunes of men have no influence 
to change her seasons of drought, her drenching 
fogs, her floods, her long winters and deep snows 
or scorching heats of summer. Nature never gets 
askew, but her balance-sheets are rarely ever made 
up. Her plus and minus signs are interchangeable, 
and her equations worked carefully out to solution 
prove her unknown quantities to be surprisingly 
large as they are less frequently surprisingly small. 
Her array of facts is never disappointing. Few 
or many, they every one tell the same truth, — 
that Nature is the handmaid of her Creator. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 259 

Indoor people do not know a tithe of the won- 
derful things that may be found in the pastures 
and woods, their never-ending delights, their odor- 
ous breathings full of ozone and tonic quality. 
What streets like the fern-embroidered avenues of 
the woodlands ! what architecture like that with 
which Nature lines their shadowy vistas ! Here 
are the teachings of a century and of infinite 
variety and interest. No wonder the grown-up 
boy sighs for the freshness and wild, unrestrained 
life of the lush grasses of the June fields and the 
breezy outlooks of the hill-sides, the soft whisper- 
ings of the trees and the chatter of the people 
who live within their sheltering shadows. The 
slender fingers of the bushes brush our garments 
as we go past them with a friendly touch, and nod 
their obeisance as they swing back into their 
accustomed places with a deft grace. There is a 
fellowship in the communion of the human wor- 
shipper among the woods and tangled grasses ; 
the overhanging arms of the gray beeches, the 
maples, and pines reach out toward the wayfarer 
along their leaf-carpeted hallways, as if they had 
the inexpressible desire to take him into their 
fullest confidence, a fellowship hardly known to 
the faith-impelled communicant bowing at the 
decorated altars of the churches of men's build- 
ing. Here is inspiration, and here are the feast- 
ing tables of the poet. If ever one feels great 



260 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

truths, it is when they are all about him ; and if 
he tells them as he sees them, he is a poet in 
truth, for he cannot be otherwise. 

Some one has said that " trees have the divine 
gift of silence ; " so have the outlying fields and hills. 
Everything one sees in nature is like the raised 
type in the books that are made for the blind. 
We read by feeling as well as by sight ; and it is 
to me one of the rarest ways to interpret the pro- 
foundest of Nature's teachings. It is the subtile 
touch, as it is the alert and keenly expectant ear 
and eye, that reveals the richest parts of the plot 
to which Nature's serial is written ; but Nature 
never gratifies people who grope among her mys- 
teries without a definite purpose. Nature has ever 
a smile and nod of appreciation for the searcher 
whose heart lends fuel to his pursuit. 

II. 

Scarcely a rod from this sagging gate is the 
old roadside watering-shed, its north end and 
easterly side clad in a single suit of hemlock, 
full of chinks and rents, each one a whispering- 
tube for the winds all the year round, and on its 
southerly aspect, the side to the highway, is the 
pine dug-out trough, rarely frescoed in various 
shades of green, and reaching from one end to 
the other of the shed. From it a narrow, wooden 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 26 1 

spout runs down through a triangular crevice in 
the wall, with its maple top-rail over all, to the 
half-hogshead in the roadside that serves the trav- 
eller's horse at all hours of the clay. The iron 
hoops that hold its black staves together are 
covered thick with a ruddy coat of rust and oxy- 
dized markings of bright yellow that present 
countless facets to the sun. This watering-tub 
sits a bit uneven upon its foundation of moss- 
covered rock, and down one side trickles a broad, 
silver ribbon of glistening water from the over- 
brimming surface above. Within its sparkling 
rim I see a wonderful picture as one would in a 
camera obscura, and I think of those lines of 
Emerson's : — 

" Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 
Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
But it carves a bow of beauty there, 
And the ripples in rhymes our oars forsake." 

I hear the rhymes of this overbrimming way- 
side watering-place, and it makes a rare song, as I 
hear all the sounds that live about it. 

A picture is like life — it is never finished; so 
these landscapes grow upon me the farther away 
I get from them. Like a canvas that gets beauty 
from the mellowing effects of long years, so the 
pictures within the narrow periphery of this old 
green moss-fringed tub take an added beauty 
because enriched by the love I bear them. The 



262 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

beauty of living does not lie so much in what one 
goes to as in what comes to one. Suggestions 
often stand for more than the realities behind 
them, that bring with them too sharpened, too 
angular an outline. The brain is peopled with 
hosts of ripened reflections and mellowed memo- 
ries, the pleasures of which keep pace with the 
added years, coming to one in the quiet of the 
night as in the song-tide of breaking day. Across 
and above the long pine trough, just within reach 
of my boyish arms, ran one of the stout, axe- 
hewn girders of this weather-stained structure, 
where the robins were flying out and in through 
the whole of the breeding-season, to one day have 
their secret nesting-place discovered. The nest 
of the robin is one of the orchard pictures. The 
wide limbs and sharply angular outline of the 
apple-tree, and the coarsely but compactly built 
nests of this plebeian among bird kind, are in per- 
fect consonance, but atop of the hemlock cross- 
beam in this old wayside resort in hot. weather 
was a favorite building-place for this slack-fin- 
gered fellow, whose notes and cheery ways made 
him doubly welcome. Many a time have I tip- 
toed up over the wobbly top-stones in the wall 
that ran by the front of the shed, to stand on the 
edge of the brimming trough, and with craned 
neck peered into the nest to count its three 
greenish blue eggs, that one day were by some 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 263 

sort of magic changed into a trio of hairy bird- 
lings, whose yellow bills upthrust would open 
wide at the lightest sound. How hungry those 
open mouths always seemed ! Under the shed 
rafters, the mother hugged the shadow of her 
perilous perch in silence, and I sometimes thought 
I could see her heart throb with apprehension, as 
if we boys were heartless robbers of bird-nests. 
But we never troubled the fledglings except to 
put a few angle-worms into their waiting mouths 
for their delectation. After a few visits of my 
own, the mother-bird became reconciled and did 
not mind them, for she would rarely go more than 
a yard or so away, but one morning old and young 
were all gone to the orchard across the swale, 
which, after midsummer, was the rendezvous for 
the robin family until they began their migratory 
journey southward. 

There was always a pool of water in the high- 
way, where a numerous butterfly family held high 
carnival in the sunshine, hovering over the water 
as if to catch reflections of the gaudy color of 
banded and spotted wing in its mirroring surface, 
or alighting along the crests of the ruts in the 
mud with these self-same wings folded tremulously 
above their backs. This must be one of their 
drinking-places. New England is rich in its beau- 
tiful butterfly family. According to Mr. Maynard, 
there are over a hundred distinct species of these 



264 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

winged flowers of the ground-atmosphere, making 
their home in the woodland shadows as in the 
broad sunshine of the fields. 

These Lepidoptera are day-flyers that, when at 
rest, carry their wings erect and folded against 
each other. The butterfly is noted for its remark- 
able and eccentric markings, its brilliant colors 
and wonderfully drawn lines, as delicately painted 
as if with the finest of camel's-hair brushes and the 
rarest of pigments. What beauty lies within the 
scalloped edges of brilliant color upon its outspread 
wings ! These little fellows of the highway-pud- 
dles and watering-places, in their coats of lemon- 
yellow, are beautiful indeed ; but far beyond them 
is the royal garb of the swallow-tail. The swal- 
low-tail butterfly is indeed magnificent, being 
found in perfection through the entire summer. 
The peacock is the smaller, but not less splendid, 
with its markings of brownish or yellowish buff, 
its purple-reds and pale blue spots, and its trian- 
gular patches of more sober color. The larger 
butterflies are noted for their strong, swift flight. 
This is especially true of the large milk-weed 
butterfly, that one sees about the meadows and 
fields in July. Where there is an abundance of 
milk-weed flowers, there you will see this fellow- 
poking his clubbed antennae unsuspiciously into 
the hidden sweets that are stored within these 
blossoms. This butterfly deposits its eggs upon 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 265 

the leaves of this weed, and in about fourteen days 
the larvae have matured, and within which time 
they have moulted thrice. After an interval of 
ten days, the pupa-life is done, during which it is 
suspended from the extremity of the pupal abdo- 
men, when the perfect insect is freed from the 
thin walls of its temporary prison, to go flying up 
and down among the milk-weed blossoms with the 
rest of its kin. 

The white-banded and blue-banded butterflies 
are remarkable for the variety and brilliancy of 
their coloring and their beautiful markings. I 
have often wished I might find Nature's dye-pots, 
out of which these beautifulcreatures filched their 
royal hues ; notably, the Red Admiral, the Hun- 
ter's, and the Thistle, as they are called by those 
who know them best. Of mountain, barren-ground, 
woodland, and meadow species, the habitats of this 
numerous winged family, silver-spotted, and clad in 
suitings of blue, scarlet, grass-green, orange, purple, 
and black, and all the drabs and browns in the mar- 
ket, the butterflies that live in the woods are the 
most delicately marked and wonderfully beautiful. 
One only needs to give these blossoms of the air 
slight attention, to find it growing into a marked 
curiosity and interest. If you will make the effort 
to capture one of these vigorous flyers, you will 
be so fascinated with the color and make of his 
coat that you will find yourself making a butterfly 



266 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

fashion-plate of your own, by catching every one 
that comes within your reach ; and you will be 
carrying them home, and pinning them to the 
draperies about your fireplace mantel, to admire 
and study at your leisure. 

Across the road was the frog-pond ; a broad- 
faced pool of stagnant water in the spring and 
fall, where, when an urchin, I had skated on 
many a Thanksgiving day, with hosts of rustling 
bulrush lances painted grayish-brown by the early 
frosts, and standing erect in their miniature field 
of ice, and the bleak November winds for com- 
pany. But in summer the sun drank it dry, and 
only the pale green sediment of its slimy bottom, 
thoroughly baked in the heat of August, was 
upturned to the sky." The melting snows and 
heavy spring rains filled it to the brim with roily 
water, that was, until long into June, the Paradise 
of the frog family. In this latter month its waters 
were green with slime and thick with frog-spawn, 
numberless clusters of jelly-like substance, each 
one full of tiny spots, eggs, embryo tadpoles. 
These eggs, that are about as large as an onion- 
seed, and that finally grow into tadpoles, are 
impregnated as soon as they are deposited in the 
water. During the passage of the eggs through 
the oviduct of the female, they become enveloped 
in a gelatinous sac, which increases to the size of 
a small orange in the water, and which is so light 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 267 

that it serves as a float, so the spawn may float 
with the ripples of the stream, if Nature so 
ordains ; it being, as well, simply an ingenious 
provision of Nature to protect the eggs from 
untoward changes in the atmosphere. We boys 
knew it only as frog-spawn ; but when the egg is 
hatched, it serves as food for the newly born tad- 
pole. The first frog is hardly anything like a frog 
at all ; he is rather an animate incongruity, with 
hardly any head, and a great deal of tail, which 
serves this orphan of the swamps as a means of 
locomotion. One by one these clusters of jelly- 
like substance fall apart and disappear ; and in 
their stead come thousands of black, misshapen 
objects, with blunt heads and long tails darting 
hither and thither, with many a graceful wiggling 
of this tapering rudder, and which, at the same 
time, serves as a fin. A few days more, and they 
have grown tiny arms or fore-legs ; and still later, 
the tails have grown short and stubby, to dis- 
appear entirely ; and by the metamorphosis have 
come hosts of froglets, that, as this diminutive 
pond gets lower, depart for the swamps and moist 
grasses in the swale, at the further side of the 
kitchen-garden ; so the black spot of this greenish- 
hued amber-colored jelly is become the diminutive 
toad we find in the pastures, on late June after- 
noons, by the roadside, and in the gardens. But 
oftentimes they are not so plenty, for I have seen 



268 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

many a day, when on a pickerel jaunt, that a 
handful of frogs would have been a treasure. 

Dr. Hill says there are ten varieties of the toad 
in the United States. The tongue of a toad is 
different from that of other animals, with its roots 
where the tip of its tongue should be, and the tip 
of its tongue where its roots should be ; it is one 
of the peculiarities of this little fellow which 
makes a minute description of himself and his 
habits interesting. Watch the toad run out his 
tongue, so long and slender and thin that he has 
no occasion to swallow. When a child, I used to 
catch my toad ; and then, as many another boy 
has done, with a dangling string, and a bit of 
bread-crust tied to it, well smeared with molasses 
to attract the flies, I would hold it before his 
toadship's mouth ; and it was rare fun to see him 
thrust his tongue outward with the rapidity of a 
lightning-flash almost, a tongue as rakish-looking 
as can be imagined, to catch every fly that alighted 
upon the simple lure. One does not see many 
toads about after October has gone, though I have 
found them under boards and bits of old lumber, 
by the roadside, after the ground has been closed 
by the frost ; they do not go into the deeps of the 
muck-beds, as has been popularly supposed, but 
adopt any shelter that seems most handy. One is 
as likely to find them hibernating under stones, and 
in the hollows of decayed trees and stumps, as 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 269 

elsewhere. When the frost is out of the ground 
in the spring, about the last of April to the first 
of May, in the most northern and eastern of the 
New England States, the trill of the toad awakens 
the silence of the swamp into a tremulo of sound. 
Toads are great gadders. Put a dozen of them in 
your garden or flower-bed over night, and by 
morning they will have become the subject of a 
mysterious disappearance, for not the slightest 
sign of a single one of them is about. Like the 
acrobats they are, they have jumped all the barriers 
of your inclosure in the uneasy life they follow. 

What a noisy place was this pool at sundown 
of the warm spring days, and what shrill pipings 
came up through the warm mists that lay like an 
immense coverlet over the pasture hollows, and 
that with silent footstep stole up to the very barn- 
yard, up through the narrow cow-lane, and into 
the farm-house door-yard ! What a melody of 
frog-notes smote the ear of Night, with the new 
moon hanging just above the tops of the pines, 
and the whippoorwill whistling from the lowland 
maples ! When I think of the new moon, just 
dipping into the warm haze on the western hills, 
as I used to see it in those days, there comes to 
mind the care I always had to see the new moon 
first over my right shoulder, "for luck;" and, I 
am afraid, even nowadays there is a trace of the old 
superstition hanging about me, for I never fail, 



270 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

with my first glimpse of the new moon in the 
west, to query over which shoulder I have seen 
it, — one of the rustic ear-marks which the grown- 
up man carries with him, to emphasize the fact of 
his once having been a country boy. 

There is something else the new moon brings 
to mind, for I remember Owen Meredith's beauti- 
ful fable of the Windmill paying court to the 
Water-mill : — 

" One summer morning, Father Jove 
Created the Windmill, wanting a fan 
To cool his palace Olympian ; 
And forbade the celestial bird to move 
From the perch assign'd him by Jove's high will. 
But alas for the Windmill ! he fell in love, 
Madly in love, with the Water-mill, 
Who then dwelt upon earth. And one dark night, 
' Jove will never find me out,' thought he, 
As earthward slyly he winged his flight 
To visit the Water-mill ; where she, 
Like a maiden demure, was sitting beside 
Her spinning-wheel. Doth she mourn for him? 
For he, having chosen (not to be spied) 
A night when the Moon was wrapped up to the rim, 
And seeing her not as he passed on the sly, 
Broke one of her horns with a flap of his wing. 
The Moon to Jove complain'd, and thereby 
All the gods got a gust of the thing, 
And the Windmill was banished to earth, but still 
Far away from the Water-mill. 
That is the reason he looks so sad. 
And the Moon keeps turning her face in heaven, 
To hide the scar which that night she had 
From the Windmill's wing." 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 27 1 

Overlooking the frog-pond was a knoll, where for 
years the parsnips, beets, carrots and turnips 
and onions grew upon a patch of rich brown earth, 
hedged in with a tall fence of rough hemlock- 
boards, as ancient, almost, as the garden itself, and 
that were of a lightish green tinge, so thickly 
overgrown with lichens and so deeply fringed 
with moss were they. And here was a huge bed 
of lovage, with its beautiful, light-colored foliage, 
and close by it was a bed of stunted sage, pos- 
sessed of a charming fragrance, and towering 
above were the abundant and graceful white um- 
bels of the caraway-plant to keep it company. On 
the further side of the garden was a thickly mat- 
ted hedge of currant-bushes, that every August 
were crimson with sour fruit. This was the an- 
cient garden-patch of the farm, cultivated from 
time immemorial, and that paid its master with 
wholesome returns of early potatoes and succulent 
green peas without stint. 

Within the secret recesses of this grass-choked 
hedge the sparrows built them dainty nests of 
woven hair, and notably a frolicsome bobolink 
came here with his soberly dressed wife to live, 
and a merry songster this feathered husband was ! 
I always watched for his coming about the first of 
June ; and he is very tame and familiar, once in 
his New England haunts. If he does not open 
his mouth, you cannot help knowing him as he 



272 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

greets you some early summer morning from the 
tallest post in the old garden-fence, in his trim 
suit of black, with a patch of brownish cream 
color on the back of his neck, his snow-white 
rump and his outer primaries tipped with yellow, 
for he is the most grotesque-behaving fellow that 
ever flew. Just the other side of the swale, where 
the sweet-flag or calamus-root grew in abundance, 
on its farther rim, was the big orchard that has 
stood here ever since these lands were cleared. 

But of the swale or swamp lovers there is rarely 
a more beautiful flower than that of the Blue Flag. 
What brilliancy of color does it possess ! Almost 
as varied as the rainbow are its hues, and it is 
well named versi-color. Longfellow calls it a 
" beautiful lily," and sings of it as beautifully : — 

" Beautiful Lily, dwelling by still rivers, 
Or solitary mere, 
Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers 
Its waters to the weir, 



" Thou laughest at the mill, the whir and worry 
Of spindle and of loom, 
And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry 
And rushing of the flume, 



" Born to the purple, born to joy and pleasance, 
Thou dost not toil nor spin, 
But makest glad and radiant with thy presence 
The meadow and the lin. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 273 

" The wind blows and uplifts thy drooping banner, 
And round thee throng and run 
The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor, 
The outlaws of the sun. 

" The burnished dragon-fly is thy attendant, 
And tilts against the field, 
And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent 
With steel-blue mail and shield." 

Its blossom comes with the Bobolink, and often- 
times the swamps and swales are fairly carpeted 
with its glories. Six-petalled, three broad blades 
drooping downward, and a verticil of three smaller 
petals curving upward from its centre, with a rare 
grace, make the flower that wins admiration from 
all who appreciate the beautiful in Nature. 

Under the shade of the old Russia apple-tree is 
a group of the orchid family, the Snake-mouth, its 
dainty, pink flower nodding with every wind that 
blows up the run. Here is one of Nature's speci- 
mens of beautiful coloring ; the consummate dyer 
of the field-blossoms has here done a master-bit of 
color-mixing, in this blush that mantles the petals 
of the humble Snake-mouth. The Bog Arum and 
Indian Cucumber are here in abundance ; and, as 
well, the stout stalks and broad, dark green leaves 
of the Indian Poke, that is ever fresh and vigorous 
in the severest of drought ; and on the lesser knolls 
and crests of the uneven places in the swale, num- 
berless ferns of the Polypody family keep the Blue 



274 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

Flag company ; while along the wall by the high- 
way, the Swamp Rose flaunts its scant but richly 
perfumed petals above them all. This swale, that 
owns its swift-running brook in the spring-time, 
that irons down the rank grasses as it flows 
pastureward with its rushing current, is dry by 
midsummer. What royal deeps of feathery -topped 
blue-joint waited here for the coming of the mower, 
and what aromatic odors filled the air as the 
scythe crept through the spiky leaves or flattened 
rushes of the calamus-root, the favorite of school- 
boy days ! How well I remember the rough, 
fimbriated, queerly shaped root of this groveller in 
the swale-mud; and how often with my jack-knife 
have I cut the fimbriate bonds that held it to its 
bed of black soil, to wash it in the clear water of 
this self-same watering-trough ! Within the shadow 
of the wide-sprawling limbs of this old-time Russia 
tree, the fruit of which had the true Cossack 
quality of rough rind and a pulp that might have 
been taken for a ball of sole-leather, — for it was 
as dry and tasteless as ever an apple could be, — 
the calamus grew rankest and most abundant ; 
but about it lurked a guardian dragon, that was 
no less than the poison-ivy, for which I had a 
most wholesome dread in swale or hay-mow. Be 
that as it may, the swale was a favorite play- 
ground, with its rushing brook in spring-time, its 
summer blossoms, and autumn fruitage. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 275 



III. 

Up the slope was a huge fruit-bearer, dubbed 
the Spurr Apple, the tallest in the whole orchard ; 
in fact, it was the tallest, largest apple-tree I had 
ever seen, and on its topmost spire Rob of Lin- 
coln would sway back and forth in the wind, 
nodding his head to one side and the other, pour- 
ing out his choicest love-songs, until the very tips 
of his wings were aquiver , with unrestrained ec- 
stasy ; and where, as Samuels says, he would 
rattle out "the most curious, incomprehensible, 
jingling, roundabout, careless, joyous, laughable 
medley that any bird-throat ever uttered." The 
arrival of the male birds precedes that of the 
females by a few days. When they have once 
made their appearance, the mating and love-making 
begin, when the air is filled with song and con- 
tention among these feathered suitors ; the air 
throbs with the rivalry of their music, but the 
early days of June are hardly over, and the mating 
is accomplished. The nest is built in some 
secret place in field or orchard, and the world is 
regaled with swelling floods of melody the whole 
day long. I have translated one of these songs ; 
or, rather, I have tried to say what it seemed this 



276 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

harum-scarum songster was trying to say to Mis- 
tress Bobolink. A song without music it may 
seem here, but I carry the music in my heart. 
O, Robert of Lincoln, I hear you now, and I am 
bewitched with your melody, as I was years ago, a 
barefooted urchin among the orchard-trees ! 

Bobolink ! bobolink ! I say, 
Bobolink ! 
Kir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-chk, chk 1 

Chee, chee, chee ! 
Here you ! here you ! See, see, see 

Ah ! Dear Mistress Bobolink, 
I love you so, I love you so, 
Only your heart and mine may know 
A life so fair, so rarely sweet, 
The perfectness of life below, 
Growing more beautiful, more complete 
With every day like as a Rose 
In wealth of fragrant, petalled bloom 
With every summer wind that blows — 
I love you so, I love you so, 

Dear Mistress Bobolink. 
Chink ! 

Kir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r, che-che ! 

Bobolink ! bobolink ! See-see-see ! 
Kur-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-chk ! 

Chee — e ! che — e ! — chee-chee ! 
Chink ! 
Never such happiness hath been 
To bird-folk ; never were wrought such days 
Within the golden looms of June ; 
Never such web of winged ways, 
In whose deft weaving to and fro 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 277 

June's shuttle swiftly flew, nor wound 
With woof of vague distrust and care, 
.But rare content with summer's round — 
.Never such happiness hath been. 
Do you hear ? Do you hear ? 
What I say, say, say? 
Bobolink-link-link ! 

Think ! thank ! think ! What do you think 

Dear Mistress Bobolink ? 
Kr-r-r-chk ! Che — e ! che — e ! 

Chink ! 
But love and summer have an end ; 
Never the life so richly blest 
Without some jealous thought inwrought 
To mar its peace with some unrest. 
Never a rose without its thorn, 
Yet heart to heart, we have no fear 
Of loss, or stinging speech of pain. 
Content are we while love is here, 
Though Love and Summer have an end. 

That's what I think, think, think, 
Mrs. Bobolink ! I say ! 
Kir-r-r-r, Che — e ! che — e ! 
Chink ! 

Bobolink's song, as Wilson Flagg says, is " over- 
flowing with rapturous admiration " for his bird- 
spouse. He. begins his love-song from this tallest 
apple-tree, or mayhap from one of the hemlock- 
posts in the garden-fence, and then starts off 
with a swift flight through the sunshine, to where 
his mate is hiding in the hedge, and, hovering 
a moment with balancing wings in mid-air, he 
pours out a flood of swift, brilliant notes in recita- 



278 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

tive, with every part of his song as droll and lu- 
dicrous and as full of irrepressible mirth and 
jollity as if it were a part in some rare good comic 
opera. He is an unrivalled singer, and is at his 
best when the afternoon is well over, singing the 
sun down out of sight oftentimes. His last strain 
has hardly died away when the robin tunes his 
whistle in the door-yard maples, and the lowland 
singers are filling the meadows with sweet echoes. 
This is the reverse of his morning performance, 
as the bobolink rarely begins his morning song 
until the sun is up, when the robin has whistled 
his throat dry, and when Robert of Lincoln has 
the whole out-door world to himself. It is a 
wonderful exhibition. Bobolink never has the 
"blues," at least he never betrays the least sign 
of mental despondency in his voice, that is ever at 
concert-pitch, and he executes his arias without a 
single false note in the whole performance. 

I am lying stretched out in the lush honeysuckle 
under the Spurr apple-tree, with face turned sky- 
ward, and Robert of Lincoln's notes come patter- 
ing down through the dark green leaves overhead 
into the grass beside me. How fast they come, 
like rain-drops in April ! How the June winds 
blow! I wonder where the winds come from ; so 
I wonder where the bobolink gets his rollicking 
song. I have thought they both came from the 
heart of Nature, so akin are they to each other. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 279 

Mrs. O'Lincoln is a lady of exceedingly "mod- 
est appearance," and very much of a stay-at-home 
body, while O'Lincoln himself is a very pattern of 
conjugal fidelity. His nest, built in the grassy tus- 
socks, holds from four to five eggs, of varying color, 
of the tint of ultramarine ash, covered with spots 
of very dark brown or dusky clay color. When 
the O'Lincoln children are out of the shell this 
orchard-singer grows silent. Family cares weigh 
more and more heavy upon him, and he is more 
assiduous in his attention to his young, scouring 
the fields for insects the whole day through. The 
mowing-field is his favorite haunt, and many a 
nest have I laid open to the sunshine with my 
scythe in the first days of July. As the summer 
grows older, O'Lincoln's garb grows sadly rusty; 
and he has really become a very quiet, respectable- 
like citizen, and just a bit inclined to a shy sort of 
pokyness, showing a marked predisposition to 
corpulency, on his diet of grasshoppers and other 
field-insects, in these idle days of closing summer. 
O'Lincoln sets a good table, as his children will 
tell you, grown almost to their father's size. By 
the middle of September, he and his family enter- 
tain thoughts of moving, and in a few days have 
begun their southern trip, which they make with 
varying fortune or misfortune, by reason of the 
constant fusillade of the shot-gun which greets 
them the moment they have crossed the border- 



280 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

line of the Middle and Southern States, where, 
and thenceforward until their return North, they 
are the much-sought-for dainties of the bird-epi- 
cure. 

These orchard-trees were the favorite hunting- 
grounds of the Downy Woodpecker. On this, 
the largest apple-tree I ever saw, the Spurr, were 
thousands of this fellow's gimlet-holes extending 
up its southerly side, from root to topmost limb. 
On the swale side was a single dead limb, almost 
the size of a man's body, and into its under side 
was cut a hole as large as a good-sized apple, with 
edges as evenly trimmed as if cut with an auger. 
Tap the trunk of the tree sharply, and the shapely 
head of a Flicker or Golden-winged Woodpecker 
is thrust just a bit out, and two bright eyes are 
looking down upon you with lively curiosity. In 
boyhood I knew this fellow as the Yellow Ham- 
mer, the most beautiful of the woodpecker family. 
A sharper rap than before sends this apple-tree 
dweller out into the sunlight, with swift and ex- 
ceedingly graceful flight ; and it is a long flight, 
as well, for he rarely stops until he is well out of 
sight, nor does he return until the intruder upon 
his domain is well away. He is hardly less shy 
than the black log-cock of the woodland. As he 
wings his way across the orchard, his passage is 
like that of some golden missile; the lightish 
brown or olivaceous green color that is so attrac- 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 28 1 

tive when one catches him at work on his domi- 
cile is changed to a flashing golden-brown when 
he is awing. If let alone, he will return year after 
year to the same bird-roof, which speaks well for 
his love of locality. I cannot do better than 
quote Audubon's charming description of this 
beautiful bird : — 

" Their note is merriment itself, as it imitates a 
prolonged and jovial laugh, heard at a considera- 
ble distance. Several males pursue a female, 
reach her, and, to prove the force and truth of 
their love, bow their heads, spread their tails, and 
move sidewise, backwards, and forwards, perform- 
ing such antics as might induce any one witnessing 
them, if not of the most morose temper, to join 
his laugh to theirs. The female flies to another 
tree, where she is closely followed by one, two, or 
even half a dozen of these gay suitors, and where 
again the same ceremonies are gone through. No 
fightings occur, no jealousies seem to exist among 
these beaux, until a marked preference is shown 
to some individual, when the rejected proceed 
in search of another female. In this manner, all 
the Golden-winged Woodpeckers are soon hap- 
pily mated. Each pair immediately proceed to 
excavate the trunk of a tree, and finish a hole in 
it sufficient to contain themselves and their 
young. They both work with great industry and 
apparent pleasure. Should the male, for instance, 



282 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

be employed, the female is close to him, and con- 
gratulates him on the removal of every chip which 
his bill sends through the air. While he rests, he 
appears to be speaking to her on the most tender 
subjects, and when fatigued is at once assisted by 
her. In this manner, by the alternate exertions of 
each, the hole is dug and finished." Audubon 
does not say anything about their habit of return- 
ing to the same nest year after year, but my own 
observation proves this, that either the old tree- 
dwellers came back with the returning summer, 
or that their nest was occupied by another family. 
I prefer to believe that my old friend came back 
to see me every year, for I do not believe he 
could have selected a better site for his rustic 
home. 

But the Bobolink and the Flicker did not have 
this old orchard all to themselves by any means, 
for the timid Song-Sparrow, the Vesper-Sparrow, 
and the Hair-Bird, the Linnet, and the Peabody- 
Bird helped to keep the air tremulous and agog 
with their sweet melody. From morning until 
night, and often after sundown, this dark-leaved 
orchard was alive with warble and chirp and trill 
and twitter that made the most charming of out- 
door orchestras. They fill the winds with speech, 
while the wild-flowers fill them with perfume, and 
so the winds blow on over the fragrant woods, the 
flower-painted pastures and fields until the day is 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 283 

blown out ; but I am back at the pasture-bars 
opposite the sagging gate by the roadside. 

Within this pasture door-way I can see the halt- 
ing line of cows as it winds up from the lowland 
feeding-grounds of the cattle below this old high- 
way. Up come the cattle, wading one by one 
through the shallow waters of the runlet, where 
the cobble-stones from the wheat-field on the side- 
hill have been dumped into its miry bed to make a 
roadway to the meadow-lands for the odorous blue- 
joint and cat's-tail grass, and that are just hidden 
by the black tops of the hemlocks at the farthest 
edge of the pastures. A small boy is at the heels 
of the slow-footed herd, screaming " hud-dup " in a 
shrill treble, and these self-same frogs, that began 
their life in the wayside pool in the earlier season, 
and that have graduated to the wet hollows below, 
pipe a frolicsome tune by the way of a chorus ; 
but the cattle do not hurry homeward a bit faster. 
It is a nibble here, and a longer bit of grazing 
there. How slow they are ! I see where the old- 
time logging-road, now a narrow, winding cow-path, 
bends its course around a cape of tall pines, and 
over the knolls crowned with thick mats of the 
dwarf-blueberry, the new shoots of which are 
weighed down with rows of waxen-petalled, bell- 
shaped, snow-white blossoms, as delicately wrought 
by Nature as they are perfet in proportion, reach- 
ing on through and between the tangles of tus- 



284 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

socks and broad patches of lambkill, the scarlet 
kalmia, that is thought to be so poisonous to the 
nibbling sheep, and the flower of which is so rich 
in simple beauty and so poverty-stricken in its 
fragrance. 

How reluctantly the cows pass through this last 
barrier between them and the sloping barn-sheds, 
whose only tenants by day are the noisy swallows 
and the numerous harem of Chanticleer, mayhap 
with a hint of clandestine visit to the lower meadow 
lingering about their perfumed cuds ! How heavily 
swing their distended udders at every lagging step ! 
They stop in the highway to throw a spray of dirt 
high over their brown backs with a quick, deft 
movement of the fore-foot, or to lazily toss their 
heads or swish their tails about their sides as the 
flies that have kept them company all day get too 
troublesome. A single cow-bell announces with 
deep musical note the movement of the leader of 
the herd. The hill-slopes above the barn blush 
red under the level rays of the sun going slowly 
down, but the herd has gone up the lane to the 
barns, and a broad phalanx of thin gray shadows 
creeps slowly after them with long, silent strides. 
I hear the " soh ! soh ! " and the sharp, querulous 
injunction "stand still!" of the milkers, and the 
pastoral song of the milk as their coaxing hands 
fill the foaming pails. I see the farm-hands, with 
the housewife at their head, come down over the 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 285 

slope, houseware!, to the pantry, with shiny, well 
filled pails, that have caught the light of the fading 
sunset, in either hand, where they set their burdens 
on the low table, to be strained a bit later. What 
a queer old place this pantry is, with its sharply 
sloping sanded floor and rows of broad shelves 
with their cream-risen pans of milk, its old stone 
cream-jar and dozen or more freshly made cheeses ! 
what a cool place even in the hottest days of sum- 
mer, with the blue paper curtain at its single 
northward-looking window pulled well down, and 
into which a ray of sunlight never shone, and that 
was raised rarely ever the width of a foot, even 
when the pans were being skimmed of their sweet 
treasures, or the big cheeses were being larded, 
as they were every morning, and with its every 
corner full of lurking shadows ! Dark and cool as 
it was, its pine shelves were diligently scrubbed 
from time to time, until they shone like thick 
sheets of polished amber, and the weekly-washed 
floor was every morning sprinkled with fresh, 
white sand from the outlet of the pine-rimmed 
pond back of the hill. 

As a boy, I remember this abode of cool, dusky 
shadows and its quaint belongings very well : and 
best of all, the old musket, that had killed its bear 
in the pioneer days ; and the big powder-horn, 
that hung by a stout leather string, that had been 
slipped between the rusty barrel and the end of 



286 A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE. 

its long iron ramrod. It was a kind of child-fun, 
surreptitiously gained, whenever I could steal into 
the old pantry and coax a spark or two from the 
battered flint, long ago fastened into its clumsy 
hammer, mayhap, when its gray-haired owner 
was a young man, or when brave old "granther 
Spurr" used to carry it on his hunting expedi- 
tions, that were many and richly rewarded, if tra- 
dition tells the truth. Those were days when 
these fields, deeply covered with thick woods, 
were peopled with a predatory race that has dis- 
appeared forever. This old. powder-horn always 
had a great fascination for me, with its black tip 
and big, white butt, scraped down almost to trans- 
parency, by the light of some long-ago expired 
hearth-fire. I always like to think that this relic 
of the old-fashioned hunting days, and that had 
been carried in the famous but bloodless Mada- 
waska War, was like those used by the farmers of 
Concord when they 

" Fired the shot heard round the world; " — 

and many a time, when a youngster, I have slung 
its burnished crescent over my shoulders, and, 
with the rusty bayonet fixed to the still more 
rusty muzzle of this antiquated fire-arm, with the 
cracked leather cartridge-box belted to my hips, 
played "soger" in the long well-room to my 
heart's content. 



A WAYSIDE WATERING-PLACE- 287 

The coolness of the woods is blown up over the 
slopes, and down in the swale under the rim of 
the orchard ; the frogs croak their content that 
the heats of the day are over. The air is full 
of nocturnal notes of cricket and katydid, and 
through them all comes the sound of rippling 
waters, like a strain of low, sweet music. The 
bushes by the roadside and the tall grasses in 
the swale are alight with the flickering candle 
that 

" The glow-worm hangs out to allure 
Her mate to her green bower at night." 

The moist air is full of the perfume of the dewy 
farm-lands. The thistle has long ago folded its 
pink petals close together ; the chickaree family 
has gone to bed in the woodpile; the bees in 
their hives under the pomegranate-trees have 
lapsed into silence ; and the mid-day wide-thrown 
doors of the woodshed are close-shut and fas- 
tened with their long oaken bar. So night 
comes, and amid the dusky shadows of the barn- 
yard the only sound is the loud snore of the cat- 
tle. Its four-footed tenants and its feathered 
harem sleep on till the sunrise, but the trickling 
song of the watering-trough by the road is never 
hushed. 



A DROP OF RAIN. 




A DROP OF RAIN. 

S the wind east or south-east ? The 
weather-wise shakes his head dubiously, 
and says, with his finger to the breeze, 
" the air feels wet ; " when, putting his barometer 
in his trousers pocket, he saunters down his fields 
and awaits with patience the coming rain. Is the 
wind from the south ? do the mackerel-backs scud 
inland from the coast ? Our farmer is still on the 
lookout for a dull day, but with the wind blowing 
stiffly from the west he plans to cut the largest 
field of grass, trusting to his hay-makers and the 
sun to make his hay. To-day the wind is in the 
west, and the mowing-machine clanks and clatters 
up the hill into the middle of the farm, while 
the men shoulder their scythes and follow after. 
Amid the music of whetstone, of ringing steel, 
and the smothered song of the two-horse mower, 
the humming of the bees, the falling clover, the 
whistle of the bobolink in the cherry-trees, and 
the hearty laugh of the men as with glittering 
scythes they chop out among the gnarled trunks 
in the apple orchard, the grass goes down the 
long forenoon. 

291 



292 A DROP OF RAIN. 

How naturally men scan the sky to glean some 
hint of what the morrow will bring of fair or foul, 
who find their occupation out-of-doors ; but not 
more so than the traveller who just now remem- 
bers the old saw of " Evening red, and morning 
gray," whether it will pour down rain upon his 
head, or, what is better, set him on his way. 
When the cuckoo sings his double note in the 
lowlands — and sweeter tone no bird-throat ever 
knew than the cuckoo's liquid speech — his proph- 
ecy is not to be disregarded, — so the farmer says. 
He is singing up the rain with a siren voice. Our 
farmer says it is a sure sign of wet. How the 
swallows dip and skim along the stubble and over 
the bending cat's-tail grass and rank clover before 
the coming storm. The winds, the cuckoos, the 
swallows, and the tree-toads belong to a weather- 
wise family. 

A speck of cloud in the west is oftentimes 
watched with great interest when the grass lies 
in the swath. It may hide the sky in a single 
hour, but the hay-makers crowd the work all the 
harder. How the steel glitters afield among the 
wind-rows and growing hay-cocks as the signs of 
rain thicken. The wind has shifted into the south, 
and whenever the wind sets from that quarter, 
with a storm-cloud in the west, the shower is sure 
to go across lots, and the uplands in its pathway 
will get a good drenching. The rain is ever wel- 



A DROP OF RAIN. 293 

come if we are prepared for it, but how about our 
neighbor. When a storm is brewing among the 
hills after a sultry forenoon, it is field-day on the 
uplands for the swift-winged swallows, who hardly 
wait for mid-day to get well past before they begin 
their multiplex gyrations, shooting in and out 
among the hay-makers, scouring the stubble for in- 
sects, with many a shrill, clear whistle and fife-like 
note, dodging here and there, now high, now low, 
sweeping, skimming, and curveting over and among 
the orchard tree-tops with arrowy, graceful flight, 
their coats of polished purple gleaming in the 
afternoon sun with every dip and rise awing like 
bits of blued steel. What endless troops of these 
barn-dwellers march and countermarch over the 
broad highways of the winds, and with what 
celerity and brilliancy of movement do they exe- 
cute these aerial passings to and fro, forward, right 
and left, back, always singly and never by file or 
platoon. Each swallow holds all the commissions 
in his division, from brigadier down, and incorri- 
gible-like "trains" on his "own hook" much the 
same as did the rustic militia of a half a century 
ago, though he is never in the "awkward squad." 
The swallows and the robins are the only birds 
that keep their courage in the face of a coming 
storm. One may sometimes catch the tremolo 
note of the upland plover as down he comes from 
his soaring, to his nest in the grass, his wings 



294 A DROP OF RAIN. 

making an arch of quivering feathers over his back 
as he alights, when the rain has broken on the 
wooded slopes across the river valley, but all other 
bird-throats are silent. The tree-toad tunes up, 
and the orchard palpitates with the music of this 
invisible singer. If among the apple-trees you 
discover a gnarled trunk, with a shallow recess or 
hole about it, then you are sure, at least you are 
very like, to find this mellow-voiced hylas cosily 
secreted within it, practising his charming ventril- 
oquism. He will play "hide and go seek" with 
you all the summer afternoon, but he reverses the 
old. school game, in which the seeker was wont to 
blind his eyes, and, with a half audible, sing-song, 
but rapid articulation, repeat this rhythmic incan- 
tation of childhood days, — 

" Hinty, minty, cuticorn, 
Apple seed, and apple thorn, 
Wire, briar, limber lock 
Twelve mice in a clock. 
Sit and sing by the spring 
Where my fathers used to dwell ; 
There are diamonds, there are rings, 
There are many pretty things 
Where the fairy sits and sings," — 

and then, with a loud, shrill " Hoo ! " to begin the 
search. The tree-toad sings his "tan-ta-ra" to 
you, and challenges you to an immediate search, 
laughing in your face the whole time as he con- 



A DROP OF RAIN. 295 

templates your stupidity and your obliquity of 
vision. He stares at you with side-splitting cachin- 
nations, while you stare at everything else but the 
object of your search. At last you find him, only 
to wonder that so little a fellow can make such a 
fusillade of sound. Size does not always count in 
Nature, as anybody can tell who has made a 
" sparring match " with the infuriated hornet of 
the meadows. 

The veery, or Wilson's thrush, throws a slender 
bar of song to the darkening air, and it comes 
clear and sweet, like the tone of some far-off bell, 
over the tops of the lowland woods. When the 
last note dies away, we wish it might have been 
prolonged, so tuneful and weird-like is the strain, 
with so little suggestion of earth and so much of 
the upper spheres in its melody. The shower is 
coming. The wind freshens or dies away, when 
the sun scalds one's shoulders with its heat. 
Under the dome of this July sky its overarching 
walls seem like those of a huge oven, the draughts 
of which are tightly shut, so heavy, so stagnant is 
its heated atmosphere. Now the sun smites one, 
with its swift, hot blows, among the wilted swaths. 
It is a beautiful sight to watch the coming of the 
summer shower, as this tiny cloud, this far-off 
speck of gray, grows into the vast cumuli of brill- 
iant vapor, with dome of snowy whiteness tower- 
ing above dome of heavier, darker mist, and over 



296 A DROP OF RAIN. 

which glow and fade all the colors of a prism, 
looming higher and higher up, to finally shut out 
the sun, filling the landscape with deep, broad 
shadow. What iridescence, what hues of mother- 
of-pearl play over its topmost crest ! How silent 
is Nature, as if cognizant of the coming battle of 
the wind and rain ! The landscape is breathless in 
the gloom fast settling over its hills and valleys ; 
but a sudden coolness blows across the lowland 
pastures, and up over the slopes of the mowing- 
fields. The trees sing low, crooning songs as the 
winds chase through their tops ; the bending 
grasses look like chopped seas of color ; still the 
men are at work afield. The base of the huge 
cloud grows still darker and more threatening. 
Its lower edge makes a sharp, black line against 
the streak of greenish yellow sky which separates 
it from the horizon, while downward and across 
it run zig-zag lines of swiftly blinding light. What 
mighty leaps this subtle fluid takes from cloud to 
cloud ! Ah, that dropping chain of flame ! as if 
the Demon of the Storm, in his attempt to mar- 
shal his minions to combat, had lost his footing, 
to come tumbling down over the ragged precipices, 
the deep canons of the air, to strike the earth 
with dire shock, dragging his servitors, and every 
one a king, with him. What sharp, scimitar-like 
edge has this first levin bolt, shot from the black 
depths of this swift-footed rain-cloud ! How white 



A DROP OF RAIN. 297 

the smoke of the farm-house chimney, as it drifts 
slowly through the stagnant air and over the tops 
of the elms in the door-yard, to fall later in tiny 
atoms to the ground with the rain ! 

A gray wall of falling rain hides the far-away 
mountains ; there is a low muttering of thunder 
beyond the ragged spur of old Porcupine ; the 
gray wall has reached the river, the wind has 
blown itself out, and the big drops of wet come 
down, one at a time, striking athwart the stubble 
with a dull thud. The skirmish-line of the storm 
has passed on ; the coppery, yellowish streak has 
changed from west to east. A single robin pipes 
an encouraging whistle ; a blinding flash of light- 
ning, that comes so near you hear its flapping 
and hissing ere the terrible crash can jar the 
earth beneath your feet, has torn the clouds asun- 
der, and the hoarse roar of the thunder, breaking 
over the woods, is drowned in the besom of the 
storm, as it rakes the valley with its hail of driving 
rain. On more than one like occasion I remember 
our getting to the house at something better than 
a dog-trot when the last hay-cap had been pinned 
down, and how we carried our steel-tined forks 
with their glittering points downward, lest they 
should attract some stray current of electricity. 
One never knows, in a thunder-storm, when the 
atmosphere is so highly charged, what slight at- 
traction may change the course of a stray spark 



298 A DROP OF RAIN. 

from these invisible Leyden jars, these batteries 
of Nature. But the hurry is over ; the hay is 
rolled up ; the white caps, of duck, or thinner 
cotton cloth, are all on, and what does it matter 
if the hay-maker gets a drenching, so long as the 
hay is dry. 

Men look at the sky and at their barometers to 
forecast the coming of winds, of changing weather, 
of damp sea-mists and storm. Men look over the 
area of humanity to glean some hints of action. 
Like the physician, who feels the pulse of his 
patient or listens at the portal of the heart for 
signs of warning, men feel along the restless, 
throbbing current of life, listen for the rasping 
breath of discontent, the irregular and spasmodic 
movements among human industries, the stilling 
of anvil and of loom. Storms gather and break, 
and yet wise men work on through them all until 
their labor is completed. The more material things 
in life find their analogies in Nature. 

To get on in life, one must read the signs of the 
times as he does his books or stock-lists. One 
must strike out boldly into the centre of the world's 
great highway, where competition is keenest, where 
people make a noise in earnest. It is a broad ac- 
quaintance that men must make to succeed, and 
broad marks tell if one makes enough of them. 

Visual experience, like familiarity of touch, is 
the secret of confidence. It is said, Dr. Agnew's 



A DROP OF RAIN. 299 

use of the knife is something marvellous. I have 
heard it said of his skill as a surgeon, that he had 
taught his left hand its brother's dexterity. Look 
out over men and things as the farmer looks over 
the hills and valleys and up into the sky, when he 
has some fair-weather plans afoot. Make your 
own comparisons ; study your chances as the sailor 
does his barometer ; reason for yourself, and when 
you have put your hand to the doing of a thing, 
do not leave it until you have accomplished all you 
have originally planned. If a shower comes out 
of the west, stick to the pitchfork and rake until 
the hay is safe. Some men are ever ready to dodge 
an issue, to throw down their tools and run for 
shelter at the first sign of a storm, but they are 
usually the men who rake after the cart. They 
have nothing at stake but their own thin skins. 

The greatest men, and as well the greatest 
women, in the world have been those who knew 
most of humanity, most of humankind and whose 
hearts were nearest Nature. The man who hears 
in the babbling brook a sweet song, who sees in 
the woods and in the limpid waters plainly written 
sermons, who looks upon the rocks, the trees, and 
the blossoming fields with a spirit of fellowship, 
needs no other cloister, no other faith. It is a 
simple creed, but God wrote it himself. Man and 
Nature are of the same kith and kin ; God made 
both. 



300 A DROP OF RAIN. 

What one gleans from books is not all of edu- 
cation. I knew a man in days gone by, a graduate 
from a distinguished New England college, who 
could tell you all about Latin and Greek roots, and 
who later was graduated from a well known theo- 
logical seminary with some degree of honor, who, 
when his health began to fail him, because of over- 
study, went back to the old homestead among the 
hills and took up the plough. This man, though 
he knew so much of dead languages, so much of 
higher mathematics and of philosophy, so much of 
all that was choice in literature, went about his 
farm with his cart-axles groaning and squeaking 
so loudly that his neighbors might hear them a 
half-mile away. One day he started out with his 
oxen and cart for the adjacent grist-mill. He had 
not gone far when he met a neighbor : — 

" Wal, deacon, 'pears like them air wheels o' 
yourn air purty dry. I've hearn 'em squeakin' 
more this year 'n ever. Why don't yer grease 'em, 
deacon ? Sounds kinder lon'som' like t' hear 'em 
whinin' up an' daown hill, an' 'cross th' fields." 

" Why, sir, it never occurred to me, but I think 
it might be a very excellent plan. I believe father 
did something of the kind when I was a boy." 

" The dern fool ! I alluz tho't 'twas a mean 
stre'k ; but, I swaow, th' critter don't know eny 
better. Wal, I declar' t' Jerusha, ef thet don't 
beat all ! an' collidge eddicated tew ! " 



A DROP OF RAIN. 3OI 

So it was with all the machinery about the dea- 
con's farm. Everything soon wore out, because 
there was a lack of knowledge of common things. 
He could not decipher Nature's cost-mark. I have 
been told the same man got lost in sight of his 
own house one summer day, but for its truth 
I could not vouch. As I saw him at one place and 
another, I often queried within myself whether he 
knew a robin by his whistle, or the difference be- 
tween a red-spot trout and the lubberly sucker we 
used to spear in the early spring-time, after the ice 
had gone out of the ponds ; whether he could 
make music out of the honk of the wild-goose or 
the cry of the loon when he halloos into the black- 
ness of the night. An overdose of laudanum 
does not always kill, an overdose of book-learning 
might as well if it makes a fool of a man in other 
things. Men born with a deformity of brain are 
to be pitied ; but they are not so badly off as their 
neighbors who, through much learning, have lost 
the sign-manual of Nature, whose moods and 
tenses are never of days and sounds, but rather of 
grammar and of books with narrow margins. I 
admire a man who insists upon a broad margin to 
his book, as to everything else. One wants to 
make a reference note occasionally. The better 
things in life are deep-rooted. There is no virtue 
in shallow soil. If the horizon of living is narrow, 
get outside and beyond it ; get above it, so that 



302 A DROP OF RAIN. 

you may overlook it, and the whole world as well. 
Don't hesitate to read a lesson from your success- 
ful neighbor, his store, field, or garden. 

Gibson found a wild-flower garden in his back- 
yard ; your own may be richer in suggestion. The 
weeds that grow in the shadows of the roadside 
fences and hedge-rows are not the least important 
of the highway's possessions, and a passing glance 
is not enough even for them. " Day unto day 
uttereth speech," and these dumb things in Nature 
have a very intelligible way of imparting informa- 
tion after all. They are the raised type of Nature : 
one has to touch things in her domain to know 
their secrets. Touch is the Sense that dominates 
everything, after all. What one can touch, one 
likes to possess. What an immense estate this 
Nature World ! The world at large is the legal 
heir ; as for myself, I may administer upon my 
share of it without giving bond. It is my own 
fault if I get not my own. It is with others as 
with myself. Get the way of a thing as the 
farmer does the hint of a stormy day, by feeling 
for it. 



'PROSE PASTORALS. 

BY HERBERT MILTON SYLVESTER. 

13mo. $1.50. 



59 



The London Saturday Review says:- 

" Mr. Sylvester is a keen observer, and knows how to delineate without 
making description tedious. His recollections of a boyhood spent among 
the hills and woodlands of New Hampshire are pleasant to read. His 
sketches of rural life around the old homestead that forms the centre of 
his youthful rambles have a piquant American flavor that will be very wel- 
come to English readers." 

The Boston Transcript says : ~wwwv™ 

" Nothing fresher, brighter, or breezier has made its appearance this 
year." 

The New York Tribune says : 

" The papers are so sound and good that an increasing audience will 
demand more of them." 

The Boston Journal says : 

" Broad pictures of country ways, drawn with loving touch." 

Richard Henry Stoddard says, in the New York Mail and 

Express : 

" There are hundreds who will prefer these ' Prose Pastorals ' to any 
and all of the poetic idyls of Lord Tennyson." 

The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette says: 
" A delightful book." 

The Boston Traveller says:- 
" Singularly charming and harmonious. 

The Boston Advertiser says : - 

" They have a simple directness that is delightful. One could hardly 
wish a better companion in the woods and fields than Mr. Sylvester, and if 
one : s excursions reach no farther than the hammock in the orchard, or 
even the veranda on the shady side of the house, he will be found equally 
entertaining. Nay, if we do not stir out of the house at all, we shall 
enjoy his society none the less." 

The Boston Commercial Bulletin says : -~~— — 

"As purposeless as a poet, he wanders out into the country with his 
reader, and shows him the beauties which even to-day exist in factory-rid- 
den New England. The scent of the new cut meadow-grass, the drowsy 
drone of the humble-bee, and the quivering lightning of the bluebird's 
wings, lie between the leaves, like so many spells, to charm away the bricks 
and mortar of our prison-house. Spoiling the maples of their sugar and 
the hemlocks of their bark, tramping through the morning meadows in 
quest of trout or across the dark patches of the woodland after strayed 
cattle, he enters with a zest upon the simple delights of country life that 
make his essays poems in prose." 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY, BOSTON. 



HOMESTEAD HIGHWAYS 



HOMESTEAD HIGHWAYS 



HERBERT MILTON SYLVESTER 

AUTHOR OF " PROSE PASTORALS " 




BOSTON 

TICKNOR AND COMPANY 

211 Element Street 

1888 



Copyright, 1888, 
By H. M. Sylvester. 



All Rights Reserved. 



ELECTROTYPED BY 

C. J. Peters & Son, Boston. 



CHARLES E. HURD, ESQ. 

TO WHOSE FRIENDLY SUGGESTION AND ENCOURAGEMENT 
ITS WRITING IS IN SOME PART DUE, 

THIS BOOK 

IS DEDICATED BY 

THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE. 



Nature is the mother of sentiment, and to 
multitudes of people nothing is more charming 
in its reminiscent quality than the old New Eng- 
land country life. Away from its quiet home- 
steads and tree-shadowed highways, into the noisy, 
crowded ruts of the city, the awakened memories of 
its old-fashioned and simple habits, its plain fare, its 
open-handed hospitality, are like beautiful pictures 
swept clear of years of dust and cobwebs. A boy- 
hood or a girlhood laid among such pastoral scenes 
is the halcyon period of a life-time. Of such, 
among the fields, the woods, the meadows and 
streams, my book is in part a suggestion. 

Quincy, Mass., May i, 1888. 



CONTENTS. 



A Mute Prophecy 15 

An Old-Fashioned Festival 19 

A Winter Resort 83 

Running Water . . . 135 

A Snug Corner 183 

A Wayside Watering-place 243 

A Drop of Rain 291 



L' ENVOI. 

" As the spinners to the end 
Downward go and re-ascend, 

Gleam the long threads in the sun; 
While within this brain of mine 
Cobwebs, brighter and more fine, 
By the busy wheel are spun." 

Longfellow. 



A MUTE PROPHECY. 



A MUTE PROPHECY. 

Aslant the threshold of the West 

Stretches a sombre reef 
Of gray ; its low, uneven scarp, 

Outlined in sharp relief 
Against the sky, is roughly set 

With pinnacles that glow 
Like Norombega's mustery 

Of centuries ago. 
The hills, with rugged, rock-set domes, 

Wind-blown and bare, uprear 
Their brightly polished topaz walls, 

In the clear atmosphere ; 
While o'er the cloud's thin, ragged rift 

Burst the deep golden floods 
Of Nature's alchemy, that sift 

Their glory through the woods. 

Night comes : the Spirit of the Frost 

His shuttle swifter plies 
'Twixt Nature's warp, and swifter weaves 

For Earth its subtle guise ; 
And down the river-path the pines 

Echo the dreary cry 
Of winds whose dying cadences 

Are Nature's lullaby. 
In the crisp air of growing dusk 

Night sets her cordon-line 
Thick with groups of glittering stars, 

That weirdly burn and shine, 
And come and go, as silently 

As lights that far at sea 
Are saiied o'er restless tides, by hands 

We cannot know or see. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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